Nielsen’s Gracenote Uses Artificial Intelligence to Classify 90 Million Songs by Style

Nielsen-owned media data specialist Gracenote wants to help music services make better mixes with fewer outliers: The company announced a new music dataset called Sonic Style Wednesday that classifies 90 million tracks not by the genre the artist is known for, but the actual style of the recording.This will allow services making use of Gracenote’s data to for instance compile a playlist of all of Taylor Swift’s dance pop hits, while keeping anything that sounds too much like country out of the mix. Or combine The Clash’s old-school punk tracks without adding some of the bands new wave fare.