  We present a fully automatic method for music classification, based only on
compression of strings that represent the music pieces. The method uses no
background knowledge about music whatsoever: it is completely general and can,
without change, be used in different areas like linguistic classification and
genomics. It is based on an ideal theory of the information content in
individual objects (Kolmogorov complexity), information distance, and a
universal similarity metric. Experiments show that the method distinguishes
reasonably well between various musical genres and can even cluster pieces by
composer.
