Large Scale Discovery of Seasonal Music From User Data

The consumption history of online media content such as music and video offers a rich source of data from which to mine information. Trends in this data are of particular interest because they reflect user preferences as well as associated cultural contexts that can be exploited in systems such as recommendation or search. This paper classifies songs as seasonal using a large, real-world dataset of user listening data. Results show strong performance of classification of Christmas music with Gaussian Mixture Models.