As someone who spends hours searching for new music, getting lost in rabbit holes of ‘related artists’ or ‘you may also like’ tabs, I wanted to see if cover art improves the efficiency of the search process. Browsing through a collection of images takes a lot less time than listening to clips of songs. As a starting place, I was curious if machine learning could accurately predict an album's genre from the cover art. In this post, I will show you how I built this model and what it teaches us about the role a record’s cover plays in categorizing and placing an artist's work into a musical context.