Meaningfully Browsing Music Services

We present a browser application that offers the user an enhanced access to the content of music web services. Most importantly, the technique we apply aims at making it feasible to add to the automated suggestion of similar artists some intentional spin, or direction. At the heart of the algorithm, automatically derived artist descriptions are analyzed for common topics or aspects, and each artist is described by the extent to which it is associated with each of these topics. The browser application enables the user to formulate a query by means of these underlying topics by simply adjusting slider positions. The best matching artist is shown, and its web page found on the web music service is displayed.