Last FM, Jazz Listeners, Dynamic Network

LastFM is a music website that allows its members to register and listen to music online. It is also a social network platform, because the members can declare friendship relationships. In LastFM, members can join a predefined groups related to their music tastes, and participate in music-related events such as concerts. Using the LastFM API, One can retrieve the information of the artist and track a user has listened to, with the exact timestamp. Moreover, it is also possible to get some information regarding the music-related events the users joined, including the exact timestamps.<br>We extracted a network by focusing on the members of the group Jazz, which is supposed to include users appreciating this type of music. We took advantage of the LastFM API to retrieve the members of this group and the existing friendship connection between them. In the end, our network contains 1702 nodes representing the Jazz users. The friendship relationships between them is static, though, inthe sense the LastFM API does not give access to any temporal information regarding their beginning or end. So, we decided to take advantage of some additional information to get a dynamic structure. We put a link between two nodes if two conditions were simultaneously true: 1) both considered users listened to at least one common artist for a specific period of time, and 2) they are friends on the LastFM platform. For the mentioned period of time, we decided to use 3 months with 1 month overlap, after having analyzed the dynamics of the platform. In other words, we extracted a dynamic network in which each time slice represents three months of LastFM usage for our 1702 users of interest. There are one month overlap between two consecutive time slices.