The Realisation of Online Music Services through Intelligent Computing

This chapter presents an extensive, although non-exhaustive, study on existing Online Music Services (OMSs), which aims at identifying two principal characteristics: (1) the functionalities and interaction capabilities offered to their end-users; and (2) the tools of computational intelligence employed so as to enable these functionalities. The study is predominantly motivated by the ever-growing impact of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research on the music industry, as new approaches for knowledge acquisition are rapidly integrated in existing online services targeting music consumers, musicians, as well as the music industry. Since MIR is inherently addressing user needs in music aggregation and distribution, the first part of the chapter is dedicated to illustrating user functionalities and accordingly classifying existing OMSs. The second part of the chapter focuses on musical semantics, different methods for harvesting them, and approaches for exploiting them in existing OMSs. Finally, the chapter attempts to foresee functionalities of future OMSs enabled by forthcoming MIR achievements.