The usage of peer-to-peer (p2p) networks for music information retrieval (MIR) tasks is gaining momentum. P2P file sharing networks can be used for collecting both search queries and files from shared folders. The first can be utilized to reveal current taste, users interest, and trends, while the latter can be used for enhancing recommender systems. Both provide opportunities for longitudinal analysis, as queries change over time and content often accumulates. Moreover, spatial analysis can expose cultural differences and the way trends propagate. However, tapping into this fountain of information is far from trivial. This paper presents a novel analysis of the shared folders data-set collected from the Gnutella network. We first present the framework for crawling the network and collecting the data. We then present some data-set characteristics, while focusing on music similarities. The paper sheds light on both the opportunities of using p2p data and its complexities.

Record label companies would like to identify potential artists as early as possible in their careers, before other companies approach the artists with competing contracts. The vast number of candidates makes the process of identifying the ones with high success potential time consuming and laborious. This paper demonstrates how datamining of P2P query strings can be used in order to mechanize most of this detection process. Using a unique intercepting system over the Gnutella network, we were able to capture an unprecedented amount of geographically identified (geo-aware) queries, allowing us to investigate the diffusion of music related queries in time and space. Our solution is based on the observation that emerging artists, especially rappers, have a discernible stronghold of fans in their hometown area, where they are able to perform and market their music. In a file sharing network, this is reflected as a delta function spatial distribution of content queries. Using this observation, we devised a detection algorithm for emerging artists, that looks for performers with sharp increase in popularity in a small geographic region though still unnoticable nation wide. The algorithm can suggest a short list of artists with breakthrough potential, from which we showed that about 30% translate the potential to national success.

It was noted in recent years that the Internet structure resembles a star with a highly connected core and long stretched tendrils. In this work we present a new quantity, the Internet geometric curvature, that captures the above observation by a single number. We embed the Internet distance metric in a hyperbolic space with an optimal curvature and achieve an accuracy better than achieved before for the Euclidean space. This proves our hypothesis regarding the internet curvature. We demonstrate the strength of our embedding with two applications: selecting the closest server and building an application level multicast tree.

Embedding of a graph metric in Euclidean space efficiently and accurately is an important problem in general with applications in topology aggregation, closest mirror selection, and application level routing. We propose a new graph embedding scheme called Big-Bang Simulation (BBS), which simulates an explosion of particles under a force field derived from embedding error. BBS is shown to be significantly more accurate compared to all other embedding methods, including GNP. We report an extensive simulation study of BBS compared with several known embedding schemes and show its advantage for distance estimation (as in the IDMaps project), mirror selection, and topology aggregation.

Embedding of a graph metric in Euclidean space efficiently and accurately is an important problem in general with applications in topology aggregation, closest mirror selection, and application level routing. We propose a new graph embedding scheme called Big-Bang simulation (BBS), which simulates an explosion of particles under force field derived from embedding error. BBS is shown to be significantly more accurate, compared to all other embedding methods including GNP. We report an extensive simulation study of BBS compared with several known embedding scheme and show its advantage for distance estimation (as in the IDMaps project), mirror selection and topology aggregation.