Hi everyone,

In the HDF5 files in /metadata/songs dataset there is a member with name
"genre". A few songs that I peeked at had empty value for that member. Also,
this field is missing from the fields list on the MSD site. Can you
elaborate, is genre set for any songs in the MSD? If yes, how many songs
have this field set?

Yours sincerely,

Igor Baltiyskiy

Hi Igor,
unfortunately, this field should have been removed in the final version of
the dataset, and is empty for all million songs.
There were discussion about setting it to something meaningful, maybe from
tags, to create a new genre recognition dataset. But this was a bad idea,
later dropped, and the field remained by mistake.
You can always infer a genre (from tags, years, lyrics, ...), but like all
genre recognition sources it would only be a bad proxy.
Thierry