  Being able to predict whether a song can be a hit has impor- tant
applications in the music industry. Although it is true that the popularity of
a song can be greatly affected by exter- nal factors such as social and
commercial influences, to which degree audio features computed from musical
signals (whom we regard as internal factors) can predict song popularity is an
interesting research question on its own. Motivated by the recent success of
deep learning techniques, we attempt to ex- tend previous work on hit song
prediction by jointly learning the audio features and prediction models using
deep learning. Specifically, we experiment with a convolutional neural net-
work model that takes the primitive mel-spectrogram as the input for feature
learning, a more advanced JYnet model that uses an external song dataset for
supervised pre-training and auto-tagging, and the combination of these two
models. We also consider the inception model to characterize audio infor-
mation in different scales. Our experiments suggest that deep structures are
indeed more accurate than shallow structures in predicting the popularity of
either Chinese or Western Pop songs in Taiwan. We also use the tags predicted
by JYnet to gain insights into the result of different models.
