Free Music Archive: 100,000+ Audio Tracks with Hierarchical Genres

The Free Music Archive (FMA) provides between 100,000 and 1,000,000 audio tracks and associated metadata for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research. Developed by Michaël Defferrard and colleagues in 2017, it facilitates tasks like genre classification and music organization.

Use Cases

• Audio classification using the hierarchical genre labels
• Audio-to-audio similarity modeling using the raw audio signals
• Music recommendation research utilizing artist and track metadata

Strengths

• Scale of over 100,000 audio records
• Hierarchical taxonomy of 161 genres
• Creative Commons license allowing for open research

Limitations

• Geographic bias toward the United States as indicated by region tags
• Class imbalance inherent in a large-scale music collection

Provenance

Source

International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), 2017

Collection Method

scraped

Freshness

Last updated 2024-09-15; originally published in 2017.

Geography

United States