What makes a song to a chart hit? Many people are trying to find the answer to this question. Previous attempts to identify
hit songs have mostly focused on the intrinsic characteristics of the songs, such as lyrics and audio features. As social
networks become more and more popular and some specialize on certain topics, information about users’ music tastes becomes
available and easy to exploit. In the present paper we introduce a new method for predicting the potential of music tracks
for becoming hits, which instead of relying on intrinsic characteristics of the tracks directly uses data mined from a music
social network and the relationships between tracks, artists and albums. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms through
a set of experiments and the results indicate good accuracy in correctly identifying music hits, as well as significant improvement
over existing approaches.
Keywords collaborative tagging - classification - hit songs - social media