#nowplaying Music Dataset: Extracting Listening Behavior from Twitter

The extraction of information from online social networks has become popular in both industry and academia as these data sources allow for innovative applications. However, in the area of music recommender systems and music information retrieval, respective data is hardly exploited. In this paper, we present the #nowplaying dataset, which leverages social media for the creation of a diverse and constantly updated dataset, which describes the music listening behavior of users. For the creation of the dataset, we rely on Twitter, which is frequently facilitated for posting which music the respective user is currently listening to. From such tweets, we extract track and artist information and further metadata. The dataset currently comprises 49 million listening events, 144,011 artists, 1,346,203 tracks and 4,150,615 users which makes it considerably larger than existing datasets.