He graduated in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology and earned his Ph.D. from the Johannes Kepler University Linz. Markus further studied International Business Administration at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration as well as at the Handelshögskolan of the University of Gothenburg, which led to a Master's degree. His main research interests include web and social media mining, information retrieval, multimedia, and music information research. He has been an active member of the MIR community since 14 years and since then co-authored almost 200 peer-reviewed research articles.