Music recommendation: audio neighbourhoods to discover music in the long tail.

Craw, Susan; Horsburgh, Ben; Massie, Stewart

Abstract

Millions of people use online music services every day and recommender systems are essential to browse these music collections. Users are looking for high quality recommendations, but also want to discover tracks and artists that they do not already know, newly released tracks, and the more niche music found in the 'long tail' of on-line music. Tag-based recommenders are not effective in this 'long tail' because relatively few people are listening to these tracks and so tagging tends to be sparse. However, similarity neighbourhoods in audio space can provide additional tag knowledge that is useful to augment sparse tagging. A new recommender exploits the combined knowledge, from audio and tagging, using a hybrid representation that extends the track's tag-based representation by adding semantic knowledge extracted from the tags of similar music tracks. A user evaluation and a larger experiment using Last.fm user data both show that the new hybrid recommender provides better quality recommendations than using only tags, together with a higher level of discovery of unknown and niche music. This approach of augmenting the representation for items that have missing information, with corresponding information from similar items in a complementary space, offers opportunities beyond content-based music recommendation.

Citation

CRAW, S., HORSBURGH, B. and MASSIE, S. 2015. Music recommendation: audio neighbourhoods to discover music in the long tail. In Hüllermeier, E. and Minor, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on case-based reasoning research and development (ICCBR 2015), 28-30 September 2015, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Lecture notes in computer science, 9343. Cham: Springer [online], pages 73-87. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24586-7_6

• Conference Name: 23rd International conference on case-based reasoning research and development (ICCBR 2015)
• Conference Location: Frankfurt am Main, Germany
• Start Date: Sep 28, 2015
• End Date: Sep 30, 2015
• Acceptance Date: Sep 28, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Nov 26, 2015
• Publication Date: Nov 26, 2015
• Deposit Date: May 4, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 27, 2016
• Print ISSN: 0302-9743
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 73-87
• Series Title: Lecture notes in computer science
• Series Number: 9343
• Series ISSN: 0302-9743
• ISBN: 9783319245850
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24586-7_6
• Keywords: Recommender systems; Novelty and serendipity; Knowledge extraction; CBR similarity assumption
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/1456