Music-related metadata is becoming more and more important in times of
digital music distribution. Methods for automatically extracting such
information from the WWW have been elaborated, implemented, and
analyzed. On sets of Web pages that are related to a music artist or
band, Web content mining techniques are applied to address the following
categories of information: similarities between music artists,
prototypicality of an artist for a genre, descriptive properties of an
artist, band members and instrumentation, images of album cover artwork.
Different approaches to retrieve the corresponding pieces of information
for each of these categories have been elaborated and evaluated
thoroughly on a considerable variety of music repositories. Moreover,
visualization methods and user interaction models for prototypical and
similar artists as well as for descriptive terms will be presented.
Based on the insights gained by the conducted experiments, the core
application of this thesis, the Automatically Generated Music
Information System (AGMIS) was build. AGMIS demonstrates the
applicability of the elaborated techniques on a large collection of more
than 600,000 artists.