Predicting Audio Popularity: A Comparative Study of Metadata and Acoustic Features Across Music and Sound Effects

Abstract

This study addresses the prediction of audio popularity on an online sharing platform by leveraging both metadata and acoustic feature representations. Two distinct categories of audio content are considered: music and sound effects. Popularity is formulated as a supervised classification task based on two target variables: the number of downloads and the average user rating. We conduct a comparative evaluation of multiple machine learning models, including Random Forest, XGBoost, and a Neural Network model. Experiments are performed across different feature sets, including metadata, platform-provided descriptors, and eGeMAPS acoustic features. Results indicate that metadata consistently provide the most informative representation for predicting popularity. Nevertheless, acoustic features alone achieve performance significantly above chance level, demonstrating that intrinsic properties of the audio signal contribute to popularity prediction.