From the website:
People have been fascinated by music since the dawn of humanity. A wide variety of music genres and styles has evolved, reflecting diversity in personalities, cultures and age groups. It comes as no surprise that human tastes in music are remarkably diverse, as nicely exhibited by the famous quotation: “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out” (Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962).
Yahoo! Music has amassed billions of user ratings for musical pieces. When properly analyzed, the raw ratings encode information on how songs are grouped, which hidden patterns link various albums, which artists complement each other, and above all, which songs users would like to listen to.
Such an exciting analysis introduces new scientific challenges. The KDD Cup contest releases over 300 million ratings performed by over 1 million anonymized users. The ratings are given to different types of items-songs, albums, artists, genres-all tied together within a known taxonomy.
Important dates:
March 15, 2011 Competition begins
June 30, 2011 Competition ends
July 3, 2011 Winners notified
August 21, 2011 Workshop
An interesting data set that focuses on machine learning and prediction.
Equally interesting would be merging this data set with other music data sets.