It is not only music consumers who have expectations of searchable music collections; along with the rise of consumer activity in digital music, there are new opportunities for research into using large music collections for discovering trends and patterns in music. Systems for
trend spotting in online music sales are in commercial development, as are systems to support musicological research into music evolution over the corpus of Western classical music scores and available classical recordings. Musicology research aims to answer questions such as:
which musical works and performances have been historically the most influential?
Strategies for enabling access to music collections, both new and historical, need to be developed in order to keep up with expectations of search and browse functionality.
These strategies are collectively called music information retrieval (MIR) and have been the subject of intensive research by an ever-increasing community of academic and industrial research laboratories, archives, and libraries.
There are three main audiences that are identified as the beneficiaries of MIR: industry bodies engaged in recording, aggregating and disseminating music; end users who want to find music and use it in a personalized way; and professionals: music performers, teachers, musicologists, copyright lawyers, and music producers.
