Music recommendations using cover images (part 1)

1 · Erik Bernhardsson · April 1, 2014, 4 a.m.
Scrolling through the Discover page on Spotify the other day it occurred to me that the album is in fact a fairly strong visual proxy for what kind of content you can expect from it. I started wondering if the album cover can in fact be used for recommendations. For many obvious reasons this is a kind of ridiculous idea, but still interesting enough that I just had to explore it a bit. So, I embarked on a journey to see how far I could get in a few hours. First thing I did was to scrape all albu...