Culture-Aware Music Recommendation Dataset with Acoustic and Cultural Cues

351,469,333 listening events from 55,190 users and 3,471,884 tracks, extended with acoustic features and country-level cultural data. Eva Zangerle of Universität Innsbruck created this dataset by augmenting the LFM-1b dataset with features from the Spotify API and cultural dimensions from Hofstede and the World Happiness Report. The dataset is described in a 2020 paper in the Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval.

Use Cases

• Training culture-aware music recommender systems based on user country and Hofstede's cultural dimensions.
• Analyzing the relationship between acoustic track features from Spotify and user listening behavior.
• Studying the correlation between socio-economic indicators from the World Happiness Report and music consumption patterns.
• Benchmarking multi-modal recommendation models that fuse user metadata, acoustic features, and cultural cues.

Strengths

• Contains 351,469,333 listening events, providing a substantial behavioral signal.
• Augments data with acoustic features for 3,471,884 tracks via the Spotify API.
• Integrates two established external datasets: Hofstede's cultural dimensions for 47 countries and World Happiness Report data for 164 countries.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the original LFM-1b user base and the availability of country information.

Provenance

Source

Extended from the LFM-1b dataset, with data from the Spotify API, Hofstede's cultural dimensions, and the World Happiness Report.

Collection Method

Listening events were extracted for users with country information, tracks were matched against the Spotify API for acoustic features, and country-level cultural/socio-economic data was joined.

Geography

User data is associated with countries; cultural data covers 47 (Hofstede) and 164 (WHR) countries.