Abstract:
While algorithmically driven curation and recommendation systems like Spotify have become more ubiquitous for surfacing content that people might want hear, expert reviews continue to have a measurable impact what people choose to listen to and subsequently the commercial success and cultural staying power of those artists. One such site, Pitchfork, is particularly known in the music community for its ability to catapult artists to stardom based on the reviews that an album receives. In this paper, we present a dataset of Pitchfork album reviews with the corresponding Spotify audio features for those albums. We describe our data collection and dataset creation process. We present basic information and descriptive statistics about the dataset. Finally, we offer several possible avenues for research that might utilize this new dataset.