It's quite possible that it's mainly using even more surface-level audio features, before getting to whether the genres are formulaic or not. For example, if sp

It's quite possible that it's mainly using even more surface-level audio features, before getting to whether the genres are formulaic or not. For example, if specific mastering studios have telltale production features visible in the audio (choice of dynamic range compression algorithms, mixing approaches, etc.), and some mastering studios mainly master, say, country, you can learn to classify country with pretty high accuracy by just recognizing a half-dozen studios' production signatures, without learning anything fundamental about the genre. Whether this happens depends a lot on your choice of data set and validation method. There's more on that (and some other pitfalls) in a paper linked elsewhere in the comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085651