Summer fun with Musicbrainz: the "real" Six Degrees of Kanye West (part 3/3)

So: now that we have had some fun setting up our local Musicbrainz database (part 1), and importing the data into our Neo4j database (part 2), we can now start having some fun. That means: checking if that actual 6 degrees of Kanye West, and the actual "Kanye Number", is findable and reproducible in our Neo4j database, in an efficient way. Let's take a look at that.

Note: part of this effort was actually motivated by the fact that I have noticed that the python code that powers the above website, actually caches the results (see the github repo for more info) rather than calculate the Kanye Number in real time like we will do here. I guess that speaks to the power of graph databases, right?

But let's take a look at some queries.

Find other artists that worked together with Kanye

Let's start with some simple

match (kanye:Artist {name: "Kanye West"})--(r:Recording)--(a2:Artist)
return kanye,r,a2
limit 100

That gives you a bit of a peek already:

Summer fun with Musicbrainz: the "real" Six Degrees of Kanye West (part 2/3)

In the first article of this series we talked about our mission to recreate the Six Degrees of Kanye West website in Neo4j - and how we are going to use the (Musicbrainz database)[www.musicbrainz.org] to do that. We have a running postgres database, and now we can start the import of part of the dataset into Neo4j to understand what the infamous Kanye Number of artists would be.

Loading data into Neo4j

There's lots of different approaches to loadhing the data, but when I started looking at the model in a bit more detail:

 

Summer fun with Musicbrainz: the "real" Six Degrees of Kanye West (part 1/3)

Last year, I had a lot of fun working with a fantastic little tool that a colleague of mine created, to analyse and enhance Spotify playlists using Neo4j. While I was working on that blogpost, and I was experimenting with what little I know of Python code, I came across another example project that Spotify actually highlighted on their website: it's called Six Degrees of Kanye West and it's simply amazing.

The idea behind this site seems to be similar to the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon": if you have ever worked with Kevin directly, your Bacon Number is 1. If you have worked with someone that has worked with Kevin, then your Bacon Number is 2. Etc etc - and then this is applied to the idea of musicians working together on songs.

For example, if you go there and you look up some unknown artist (like then inimitable Belgian schlager singer, Helmut Lotti), like this: