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Tags

Methodology

Tags are a way for listeners to define the music they listen to in whatever way they like. A tag is simply any description of an artist, album, or track. A tag can consist of one or more words, and common tags include: 80s, acoustic, alternative, ambient, britpop, electronic, japanese, and seen live. Tags typically encompass genre, geographic location, mood or feel, or user experiences, but a tag can be whatever the user wants it to be.

Pros and Cons

Tags are a convenient and flexible way for users to describe their own experience, but their inherent flexibility makes these labels unspecific and broadly defined, limiting their potential use in music recommendation. Tags are used by Last.fm to allow users to define and categorize their music any way they like, while they are used by AllMusic for the website to define its own intricate multitiered interconnections of music. However, because everyone understands and hears music in a unique and different way, tags are not a specific and accurate way of defining individual preferences in music. Tags are simply imposing another layer of subjective interpretation on top of the already subjective music listening experience, and for this reason a statistical analysis concentrating on patterns between the fundamental units of music is a more accurate method of describing a user's music tastes and can be better used to recommend new music.