1. MUSIC IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM: ADDRESS METADATA ISSUES BY NOT FIXING IT
Anoosha Chanda
Senior Software Pandora

2. AGENDA Music Metadata Challenges with Music metadata
Music Identification
Technical Solutions
Path to a cleaner catalog
Agenda of the talk
Start with an introduction to the challenges with music metadata, why it is broken and why we can’t fix it.
Metadata role in music identification.
Music identification systems and solutions to implement them.
How to build a path to a cleaner catalog organization? What are the pressing problems that any music streaming service faces?

3. MUSIC METADATA Track, Album, Artist, Label, and Genre information
Identifiers:
International Standard Recording Code and Universal Product Code
Post direct deals, deliveries from providers in DDEX format
DDEX standard is a consortium of leading media companies, music licensing organizations, and digital service providers, focused on the creation of digital supply chain standards.
ISRC – International standard recording code for a recording (Record label)
UPC – Universal Product Code for an album
ISWC – International standard work code (Publisher)

4. CHALLENGES WITH MUSIC METADATA
Poor management of ISRC and UPC
Record Labels and Artists agreements
Multiple Deliveries from same Record Label
Catalog growth
Artists agreements with record label can change. The changes will result in multiple deliveries. Sometimes, conflicts can arise even though it was the same track we received earlier.
Number of deliveries of a track can increase duplicates.
It is not ideal to start fixing the existing content as the music content is increasing at a higher rate.
Multiple Versions of Recordings

5. HOTLINE BLING MY WAY Hotline Bling by Drake (Single) Views by Drake
(Original Album)
R&B + Chill by Various Artists
(Collaboration)
Hotline Bling (Remixed + Reworked) by DJ Remix Factory
(Remix)
MY WAY
Versions like live, remix, studio recording, remastered, credits etc. pose another challenge.
The Main Event (K) by Frank Sinatra
(Live)
My Way by Frank Sinatra Tribute Band
(Karaoke)
My Way by Frank Sinatra
(Remastered)
My Way – Instrumental by The Gary Tesca Orchestra
(Cover)

6. S T A N D B Y M E
Want to take you all to a tour of Stand By Me for a minute.
Reggae example

7. MUSIC IDENTIFICATION
Primary usage of music metadata is music identification.
We will discuss a couple of solutions to identify music without addressing the metadata inconsistencies directly.

8. AUDIO FINGERPRINTING
eJzlnAmSJDeORa_EfTkO1_sfYR7g3cVSTgdTNaHsWkYyg8nCCRIAwY8PuqeMMdabi4jhJmq8iZkuwsZyE7XdxOwX4exVxHETc12EF59fi2JvYviLCPx7ESHeRLqKUW5i3..
1. Each track is down sampled to 11kHz mono signal and passed through a whitening filter to reduce strong or stationary resonance in the signals that can be caused due to the type of recording. Then, we capture the relative timing between successive beat-like onsets detected in the audio. It captures the peaks in the spectrogram and stores them based on their time of occurrence as {hash, time} pairs, raw hash with time.
2. The raw hash code is stored on Solr. Solr is open source search platform. The code is encoded using Base64 encoder to create a fingerprint for easy handling.

9. PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT
Precision and Recall
𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛= 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 +𝑓𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠
𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙= 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 +𝑓𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑒 𝑛𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠
In house technology vs. commercial solutions
In short, we look for a system with not too many false positives (better precision) and not too many false negatives (better recall).
In house technologies: you may use open source technologies to build it. OpenFP, Echoprint, Musicuri, audioscout
Third party technologies: Gracenote, Audiblemagic, audioID, shazam and ACRCloud, a cloud platform that helps companies and developers integrate ACR
Cons with fingerprinting system: even though it works well with most of genres, certain genres are not working as expected. For instance, classical, EDM
Songs with different intro.
Limitations in Classical, Reggae and EDM genres

10. GROUPING Recordings grouping: fingerprinting with metadata analysis
Can also be applied to albums, artists, and labels etc.
Open music encyclopedia
Data science
Grouping: fingerprinting and use other identifiers to generate metadata group.
Automated grouping with ranking would be ideal metadata management system.

11. NEED FOR HUMAN CURATION
Validation of Automated Systems
Curation comes to rescue when automation fails.
End with a quality control at scale: having curators, librarians and catalog managers to create a Segway to Taylor’s metadata.
Fixing Clean vs. Explicit, Artwork, Sub titles etc.
Quality Control at scale

12. PATH TO A CLEANER CATALOG
Link International Standard Musical Work Code (ISWC) to ISRC
Global music database
ISWC - International Standard Musical Work Code - a unique, permanent and internationally recognized reference number for the identification of musical works.
The ISWC identifies the musical work regardless of its copyright status, and regardless of agreements related to publication or the distribution of royalties in respect to the use of this work. This means that an ISWC will not change when a new agreement is made for the work, when the agreed distribution changes or when the work moves into the public domain. 
ISRCs are usually provided by your label or distributor. ISWCs are assigned by “Performing rights organization” when your songs are registered.
Each recording should only have one ISRC, but one song can have multiple ISRCs if the song has been recorded, remixed or edited more than once.
Recording vs song identification number
ISRCs to match master recordings to underlying compositions. ISWC helps to use your music distinguish your song from similarly titled songs and provides valuable metadata
Linking ISWC to ISRC is challenging as we get ISRC from labels and ISWC for publishers. With the direct deals, we have access to ISRCs.
Industry Projects to Link Compositions (ISWCs) and Recordings (ISRCs)
DDEX launched a new Linking working group to tackle this issue. And, SoundExchange project was also started working towards addressing this issue.

13. THANK YOU