Part 1 of the Social Tags and Music Information Retrieval Tutorial. Abstract: Social Tags are free text labels that are applied to items such as artists, playlists and songs. These tags have the potential to have a positive impact on music information retrieval research. In this tutorial we describe the state of the art in commercial and research social tagging systems for music. We explore some of the motivations for tagging. We describe the factors that affect the quantity and quality of collected tags. We present a toolkit that MIR researchers can use to harvest and process tags. We look at how tags are collected and used in current commercial and research systems. We explore some of the issues and problems that are encountered when using tags. We present current MIR-related research centered on social tags and suggest possible areas of exploration for future resear