Songrium: Browsing and Listening Environment for Music Content Creation Community

This paper describes a music browsing assistance service, Songrium (http://songrium.jp), which enables visualization and exploration of large amounts of user-generated music content with the aim of enhancing user experiences in enjoying music. Such a huge amount of usergenerated content has yielded “web-native music”, which we define as musical pieces that are published, shared, and remixed (have derivative works created) entirely on the web. Songrium has two interfaces for browsing and listening to web-native music from the viewpoints of scale and time: Songrium3D for gaining communityscale awareness and Interactive History Player for gaining community-history awareness. Both were developed to stimulate community activities for web-native music by visualizing large amounts of music content spatially or chronologically and by providing interactive enriched experiences. Songrium has analyzed more than 680,000 music video clips on the most popular Japanese video-sharing service, Niconico, which includes original songs of webnative music and their derivative works such as covers and dance arrangements. Analyses of more than 120,000 original songs reveal that over 560,000 derivative works have been generated, contributing to the enrichment of usergenerated music content.