Support the Underground: Characteristics of Beyond-Mainstream Music Listeners

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kowald, Dominik, Muellner, Peter, Zangerle, Eva, Bauer, Christine, Schedl, Markus, Lex, Elisabeth
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2021
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author Kowald, Dominik
Muellner, Peter
Zangerle, Eva
Bauer, Christine
Schedl, Markus
Lex, Elisabeth
author_facet Kowald, Dominik
Muellner, Peter
Zangerle, Eva
Bauer, Christine
Schedl, Markus
Lex, Elisabeth
contents Music recommender systems have become an integral part of music streaming services such as Spotify and Last.fm to assist users navigating the extensive music collections offered by them. However, while music listeners interested in mainstream music are traditionally served well by music recommender systems, users interested in music beyond the mainstream (i.e., non-popular music) rarely receive relevant recommendations. In this paper, we study the characteristics of beyond-mainstream music and music listeners and analyze to what extent these characteristics impact the quality of music recommendations provided. Therefore, we create a novel dataset consisting of Last.fm listening histories of several thousand beyond-mainstream music listeners, which we enrich with additional metadata describing music tracks and music listeners. Our analysis of this dataset shows four subgroups within the group of beyond-mainstream music listeners that differ not only with respect to their preferred music but also with their demographic characteristics. Furthermore, we evaluate the quality of music recommendations that these subgroups are provided with four different recommendation algorithms where we find significant differences between the groups. Specifically, our results show a positive correlation between a subgroup's openness towards music listened to by members of other subgroups and recommendation accuracy. We believe that our findings provide valuable insights for developing improved user models and recommendation approaches to better serve beyond-mainstream music listeners.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2102_12188
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Support the Underground: Characteristics of Beyond-Mainstream Music Listeners
Kowald, Dominik
Muellner, Peter
Zangerle, Eva
Bauer, Christine
Schedl, Markus
Lex, Elisabeth
Information Retrieval
Music recommender systems have become an integral part of music streaming services such as Spotify and Last.fm to assist users navigating the extensive music collections offered by them. However, while music listeners interested in mainstream music are traditionally served well by music recommender systems, users interested in music beyond the mainstream (i.e., non-popular music) rarely receive relevant recommendations. In this paper, we study the characteristics of beyond-mainstream music and music listeners and analyze to what extent these characteristics impact the quality of music recommendations provided. Therefore, we create a novel dataset consisting of Last.fm listening histories of several thousand beyond-mainstream music listeners, which we enrich with additional metadata describing music tracks and music listeners. Our analysis of this dataset shows four subgroups within the group of beyond-mainstream music listeners that differ not only with respect to their preferred music but also with their demographic characteristics. Furthermore, we evaluate the quality of music recommendations that these subgroups are provided with four different recommendation algorithms where we find significant differences between the groups. Specifically, our results show a positive correlation between a subgroup's openness towards music listened to by members of other subgroups and recommendation accuracy. We believe that our findings provide valuable insights for developing improved user models and recommendation approaches to better serve beyond-mainstream music listeners.
title Support the Underground: Characteristics of Beyond-Mainstream Music Listeners
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12188