# An Analysis of Classification Approaches for Hit Song Prediction using Engineered Metadata Features with Lyrics and Audio Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13507 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13507/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Song Hit Prediction: Predicting Billboard Hits Using Spotify Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08609/) (2019)
- [Dance Hit Song Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08076/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Beyond the Hook: Predicting Billboard Hot 100 Chart Inclusion with Machine Learning from Streaming, Audio Signals, and Perceptual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24856/) (2025)
- [APEX: Large-scale Multi-task Aesthetic-Informed Popularity Prediction for AI-Generated Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03395/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hit song prediction, one of the emerging fields in music information retrieval (MIR), remains a considerable challenge. Being able to understand what makes a given song a hit is clearly beneficial to the whole music industry. Previous approaches to hit song prediction have focused on using audio features of a record. This study aims to improve the prediction result of the top 10 hits among Billboard Hot 100 songs using more alternative metadata, including song audio features provided by Spotify, song lyrics, and novel metadata-based features (title topic, popularity continuity and genre class). Five machine learning approaches are applied, including: k-nearest neighbours, Naive Bayes, Random Forest, Logistic Regression and Multilayer Perceptron. Our results show that Random Forest (RF) and Logistic Regression (LR) with all features (including novel features, song audio features and lyrics features) outperforms other models, achieving 89.1% and 87.2% accuracy, and 0.91 and 0.93 AUC, respectively. Our findings also demonstrate the utility of our novel music metadata features, which contributed most to the models' discriminative performance.