Extending Music Annotation Schemas: Zero-Shot Prediction or Few-Shot Adaptation?

Christos Plachouras, Emmanouil Benetos, Johan Pauwels

Automatic music annotation is typically tackled under the assumption of a fixed annotation schema. In practice, commercial music catalogs often need to accommodate new musical attributes as needs evolve. Given that expert music annotation is expensive, it is not evident which methodological approach is most effective at accommodating new attributes and backfilling existing tracks; audio-language models promise zero-shot prediction, but at what annotation budget does supervised adaptation become more compelling? We propose a benchmark based on the MGPHot popular music annotation dataset for simulating music schema extension across different annotation budgets. We investigate zero-shot prediction with audio-language models, learning new attributes from pretrained representations, and adapting models trained on existing annotations. Our results suggest that supervised adaptation is more effective than zero-shot prediction even with small annotation budgets, while frozen representation reuse remains the most effective approach for modest budgets without the tuning required by deeper adaptation.