Revisiting the problem of audio-based hit song prediction using convolutional neural networks

Being able to predict whether a song can be a hit has important applications in the music industry. Although it is true that the popularity of a song can be greatly affected by external factors such as social and commercial influences, to which degree audio features computed from musical signals (whom we regard as internal factors) can predict song popularity is an interesting research question on its own. Motivated by the recent success of deep learning techniques, we attempt to extend previous work on hit song prediction by jointly learning the audio features and prediction models using deep learning. Specifically, we experiment with a convolutional neural network model that takes the primitive mel-spectrogram as the input for feature learning, a more advanced JYnet model that uses an external song dataset for supervised pre-training and auto-tagging, and the combination of these two models. We also consider the inception model to characterize audio information in different scales. Our experiments suggest that deep structures are indeed more accurate than shallow structures in predicting the popularity of either Chinese or Western Pop songs in Taiwan. We also use the tags predicted by JYnet to gain insights into the result of different models.