My dataset will be centred around Arctic Monkeys, an award-winning British (indie) rock band from Sheffield. The band was formed in 2002 by Alex Turner (signer, songwriter) and guitarist Jamie Cook. Other members include Nick O'Malley (bass guitar, backing vocals) and Matt Helders (drums, backing vocals). Up to now, Arctic Monkeys have released 6 albums, with their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (2006), being the fastest-selling debut album by a band in UK chart history. Arctic Monkeys was a clear choice for the theme of my dataset since I admire their work and I thought that this project would be a great opportunity for me to explore it on a deeper level. What is more, due to their popularity, all types of data required for this project were easy to find.
The band's official website does not feature any metadata, or scores related to their work, but some acoustic data are present in a form of YouTube videos under the “Videos” tab. However, their work is analysed and curated on all major music streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube Music).
Descriptive data about their work can be found on for example, Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer. It is presented in a nice graphical user interface, listing the artist's name, albums and songs and the metadata associated with them. Apple Music is the only platform to feature metadata related to genre. The individual songs are curated in albums and playlists defined by the platform or by its users. There is also a "Similar Artists" section where one can find other similar-sounding bands and I know that Spotify recommends new songs based on someone's listening patterns. Thus, the music there is analysed and curated computationally, by feeding various machine learning algorithms with music metadata. I found out that the richness and type of music metadata presented to the user differs with each streaming platform. For example, as mentioned before, Apple Music is the only platform to include music genre. Deezer does not display such data and it also does not display the information about the producer or songwriter of a particular song which both Apple Music and Spotify do.
There were several platforms that featured digital scores for Arctic Monkeys, for instance, musicnotes or MuseScore. I settled with MuseScore since it was easy to navigate, one could filter the results by, for example, the instruments present or copyrights and it featured scores for almost all songs by Arctic Monkeys.
Acoustic data for Arctic Monkeys is available on all major music streaming platforms, YouTube and SoundCloud. The acoustic data from YouTube videos can be extracted using various specialised programs and can be used for educational purposes without the artist's permission (fair use).