This paper introduces effective design choices for text-to-music retrieval systems. An ideal text-based retrieval system would support various input queries such as pre-defined tags, unseen tags, and sentence-level descriptions.

In reality, most previous works mainly focused on a single query type (tag or sentence) which may not generalize to another input type. Hence, we review recent text-based music retrieval systems using our proposed benchmark in two main aspects: input text representation and training objectives.

Our findings enable a universal text-to-music retrieval system that achieves comparable retrieval performances in both tag- and sentence-level inputs. Furthermore, the proposed multimodal representation generalizes to 9 different downstream music classification tasks.

We present the code and demo online.