This paper introduces Track Mix, a personalized playlist generation system released in 2022 on the music streaming service Deezer. Track Mix automatically generates "mix" playlists inspired by initial music tracks, allowing users to discover music similar to their favorite content. To generate these mixes, we consider a Transformer model trained on millions of track sequences from user playlists. In light of the growing popularity of Transformers in recent years, we analyze the advantages, drawbacks, and technical challenges of using such a model for mix generation on the service, compared to a more traditional collaborative filtering approach. Since its release, Track Mix has been generating playlists for millions of users daily, enhancing their music discovery experience on Deezer.
The behavior of users of music streaming services is investigated from the point of view of the temporal dimension of individual songs; specifically, the main object of the analysis is the point in time within a song at which users stop listening and start streaming another song ("skip"). The main contribution of this study is the ascertainment of a correlation between the distribution in time of skipping events and the musical structure of songs. It is also shown that such distribution is not only specific to the individual songs, but also independent of the cohort of users and, under station…
Deezer Research（Deezer研究院）；École Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；Univ. Paris Dauphine（巴黎多芬大学）
Music streaming services heavily rely on recommender systems to improve their users' experience, by helping them navigate through a large musical catalog and discover new songs, albums or artists. However, recommending relevant and personalized content to new users, with few to no interactions with the catalog, is challenging. This is commonly referred to as the user cold start problem. In this applied paper, we present the system recently deployed on the music streaming service Deezer to address this problem. The solution leverages a semi-personalized recommendation strategy, based on a deep …
At the core of many important machine learning problems faced by online streaming services is a need to model how users interact with the content they are served. Unfortunately, there are no public datasets currently available that enable researchers to explore this topic. In order to spur that research, we release the Music Streaming Sessions Dataset (MSSD), which consists of 160 million listening sessions and associated user actions. Furthermore, we provide audio features and metadata for the approximately 3.7 million unique tracks referred to in the logs. This is the largest collection of s…
Do Recommender Systems Promote Local Music? A Reproducibility Study Using Music Streaming Data
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LIPN（巴黎第十三大学计算机科学实验室）；USPN（巴黎第十三大学）；LTCI（法国电信学院）；Télécom Paris（巴黎电信学院）；Deezer Research（Deezer研究院）；PACTE（政治与公共行动研究中心）；Sciences Po Grenoble（格勒诺布尔政治学院）
Internet based businesses and products (e.g. e-commerce, music streaming) are becoming more and more sophisticated every day with a lot of focus on improving customer satisfaction. A core way they achieve this is by providing customers with an easy access to their products by structuring them in catalogues using navigation bars and providing recommendations. We refer to these catalogues as product concepts, e.g. product categories on e-commerce websites, public playlists on music streaming platforms. These product concepts typically contain products that are linked with each other through some…
Most music streaming services rely on automatic recommendation algorithms to exploit their large music catalogs. These algorithms aim at retrieving a ranked list of music tracks based on their similarity with a target music track. In this work, we propose a method for direct recommendation based on the audio content without explicitly tagging the music tracks. To that aim, we propose several strategies to perform triplet mining from ranked lists. We train a Convolutional Neural Network to learn the similarity via triplet loss. These different strategies are compared and validated on a large-sc…
Automatically generating or captioning music playlist titles given a set of tracks is of significant interest in music streaming services as customized playlists are widely used in personalized music recommendation, and well-composed text titles attract users and help their music discovery. We present an encoder-decoder model that generates a playlist title from a sequence of music tracks. While previous work takes track IDs as tokenized input for playlist title generation, we use artist IDs corresponding to the tracks to mitigate the issue from the long-tail distribution of tracks included in…
We consider the task of sequencing tracks on music streaming platforms where the goal is to maximise not only user satisfaction, but also artist- and platform-centric objectives, needed to ensure long-term health and sustainability of the platform. Grounding the work across four objectives: Sat, Discovery, Exposure and Boost, we highlight the need and the potential to trade-off performance across these objectives, and propose Mostra, a Set Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture equipped with submodular multi-objective beam search decoding. The proposed model affords system designers th…
The music streaming service Deezer extensively relies on its Flow algorithm, which generates personalized radio-style playlists of songs, to help users discover musical content. Nonetheless, despite promising results over the past years, Flow used to ignore the moods of users when providing recommendations. In this paper, we present Flow Moods, an improved version of Flow that addresses this limitation. Flow Moods leverages collaborative filtering, audio content analysis, and mood annotations from professional music curators to generate personalized mood-specific playlists at scale. We detail …
Music recommender systems have become a key technology supporting the access to increasingly larger music catalogs in on-line music streaming services, on-line music shops, and private collections. The interaction of users with large music catalogs is a complex phenomenon researched from different disciplines. We survey our works investigating the machine learning and data mining aspects of hybrid music recommender systems (i.e., systems that integrate different recommendation techniques). We proposed hybrid music recommender systems based solely on data and robust to the so-called "cold-start…
As music streaming services dominate the music industry, the playlist is becoming an increasingly crucial element of music consumption. Con- sequently, the music recommendation problem is often casted as a playlist generation prob- lem. Better understanding of the playlist is there- fore necessary for developing better playlist gen- eration algorithms. In this work, we analyse two playlist datasets to investigate some com- monly assumed hypotheses about playlists. Our findings indicate that deeper understanding of playlists is needed to provide better prior infor- mation and improve machine le…
One of the main limitations in the field of audio signal processing is the lack of large public datasets with audio representations and high-quality annotations due to restrictions of copyrighted commercial music. We present Melon Playlist Dataset, a public dataset of mel-spectrograms for 649,091tracks and 148,826 associated playlists annotated by 30,652 different tags. All the data is gathered from Melon, a popular Korean streaming service. The dataset is suitable for music information retrieval tasks, in particular, auto-tagging and automatic playlist continuation. Even though the latter can…
Online music services have tens of millions of tracks. The content itself is broad and covers various musical genres as well as non-musical audio content such as radio plays and podcasts. The sheer scale and diversity of content makes it difficult for a user to find relevant tracks. Relevant recommendations are therefore crucial for a good user experience. Here we present a method to compute track-track similarities using collaborative filtering signals with side information. On a data set from music streaming service SoundCloud, the method here outperforms the widely adopted implicit matrix f…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（印度海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；University of Jyväskylä（于韦斯屈莱大学）
Musical preferences have been considered a mirror of the self. In this age of Big Data, online music streaming services allow us to capture ecologically valid music listening behavior and provide a rich source of information to identify several user-specific aspects. Studies have shown musical engagement to be an indirect representation of internal states including internalized symptomatology and depression. The current study aims at unearthing patterns and trends in the individuals at risk for depression as it manifests in naturally occurring music listening behavior. Mental well-being scores…
Music recommender systems have become central parts of popular streaming platforms such as Last.fm, Pandora, or Spotify to help users find music that fits their preferences. These systems learn from the past listening events of users to recommend music a user will likely listen to in the future. Here, current algorithms typically employ collaborative filtering (CF) utilizing similarities between users' listening behaviors. Some approaches also combine CF with content features into hybrid recommender systems. While music recommender systems can provide quality recommendations to listeners of ma…
An increasing amount of digital music is being published daily. Music streaming services often ingest all available music, but this poses a challenge: how to recommend new artists for which prior knowledge is scarce? In this work we aim to address this so-called cold-start problem by combining text and audio information with user feedback data using deep network architectures. Our method is divided into three steps. First, artist embeddings are learned from biographies by combining semantics, text features, and aggregated usage data. Second, track embeddings are learned from the audio signal a…
In recent years, streaming music platforms have become very popular mainly due to the huge number of songs these systems make available to users. This enormous availability means that recommendation mechanisms that help users to select the music they like need to be incorporated. However, developing reliable recommender systems in the music field involves dealing with many problems, some of which are generic and widely studied in the literature, while others are specific to this application domain and are therefore less well-known. This work is focused on two important issues that have not rec…
A DJ mix is a sequence of music tracks concatenated seamlessly, typically rendered for audiences in a live setting by a DJ on stage. As a DJ mix is produced in a studio or the live version is recorded for music streaming services, computational methods to analyze DJ mixes, for example, extracting track information or understanding DJ techniques, have drawn research interests. Many of previous works are, however, limited to identifying individual tracks in a mix or segmenting it, and the sizes of the datasets are usually small. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of DJ music by align…
Popularity bias is the idea that a recommender system will unduly favor popular artists when recommending artists to users. As such, they may contribute to a winner-take-all marketplace in which a small number of artists receive nearly all of the attention, while similarly meritorious artists are unlikely to be discovered. In this paper, we attempt to measure popularity bias in three state-of-art recommender system models (e.g., SLIM, Multi-VAE, WRMF) and on three commercial music streaming services (Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube). We find that the most accurate model (SLIM) also has the most…
International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
Music, an integral part of our lives, which is not only a source of entertainment but plays an important role in mental well-being by impacting moods, emotions and other affective states. Music preferences and listening strategies have been shown to be associated with the psychological well-being of listeners including internalized symptomatology and depression. However, till date no studies exist that examine time-varying music consumption, in terms of acoustic content, and its association with users' well-being. In the current study, we aim at unearthing static and dynamic patterns prevalent…
On an artist's profile page, music streaming services frequently recommend a ranked list of "similar artists" that fans also liked. However, implementing such a feature is challenging for new artists, for which usage data on the service (e.g. streams or likes) is not yet available. In this paper, we model this cold start similar artists ranking problem as a link prediction task in a directed and attributed graph, connecting artists to their top-k most similar neighbors and incorporating side musical information. Then, we leverage a graph autoencoder architecture to learn node embedding represe…
Recommendation systems that automatically generate personalized music playlists for users have attracted tremendous attention in recent years. Nowadays, most music recommendation systems rely on item-based or user-based collaborative filtering or content-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel mixture hidden Markov model (HMM) for music play sequence prediction. We compare the mixture model with state-of-the-art methods and evaluate the predictions quantitatively and qualitatively on a large-scale real-world dataset in a Kaggle competition. Results show that our model significantly…
Modelling sequential music skips provides streaming companies the ability to better understand the needs of the user base, resulting in a better user experience by reducing the need to manually skip certain music tracks. This paper describes the solution of the University of Copenhagen DIKU-IR team in the 'Spotify Sequential Skip Prediction Challenge', where the task was to predict the skip behaviour of the second half in a music listening session conditioned on the first half. We model this task using a Multi-RNN approach consisting of two distinct stacked recurrent neural networks, where one…
University of Salamanca（萨拉曼卡大学）；Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工大学）
Online streaming services have become the most popular way of listening to music. The majority of these services are endowed with recommendation mechanisms that help users to discover songs and artists that may interest them from the vast amount of music available. However, many are not reliable as they may not take into account contextual aspects or the ever-evolving user behavior. Therefore, it is necessary to develop systems that consider these aspects. In the field of music, time is one of the most important factors influencing user preferences and managing its effects, and is the motivati…
Repetition in music consumption is a common phenomenon. It is notably more frequent when compared to the consumption of other media, such as books and movies. In this paper, we show that one particularly interesting repetitive behavior arises when users are consuming new items. Users' interest tends to rise with the first repetitions and attains a peak after which interest will decrease with subsequent exposures, resulting in an inverted-U shape. This behavior, which has been extensively studied in psychology, is called the mere exposure effect. In this paper, we show how a number of factors, …
Session length is a very important aspect in determining a user's satisfaction with a media streaming service. Being able to predict how long a session will last can be of great use for various downstream tasks, such as recommendations and ad scheduling. Most of the related literature on user interaction duration has focused on dwell time for websites, usually in the context of approximating post-click satisfaction either in search results, or display ads. In this work we present the first analysis of session length in a mobile-focused online service, using a real world data-set from a major m…
With music becoming an essential part of daily life, there is an urgent need to develop recommendation systems to assist people targeting better songs with fewer efforts. As the interactions between users and songs naturally construct a complex network, community detection approaches can be applied to reveal users' potential interests on songs by grouping relevant users & songs to the same community. However, as the types of interaction could be heterogeneous, it challenges conventional community detection methods designed originally for homogeneous networks. Although there are existing works …
The amount of content on online music streaming platforms is immense, and most users only access a tiny fraction of this content. Recommender systems are the application of choice to open up the collection to these users. Collaborative filtering has the disadvantage that it relies on explicit ratings, which are often unavailable, and generally disregards the temporal nature of music consumption. On the other hand, item co-occurrence algorithms, such as the recently introduced word2vec-based recommenders, are typically left without an effective user representation. In this paper, we present a n…
Streaming services use recommender systems to surface the right music to users. Playlists are a popular way to present music in a list-like fashion, ie as a plain list of songs. An alternative are tours, where the songs alternate segues, which explain the connections between consecutive songs. Tours address the user need of seeking background information about songs, and are found to be superior to playlists, given the right user context. In this work, we provide, for the first time, a user-centered evaluation of two tour-generation algorithms (Greedy and Optimal) using semi-structured intervi…
Music recommender systems are an integral part of our daily life. Recent research has seen a significant effort around black-box recommender based approaches such as Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). These advances have led, together with the increasing concerns around users' data collection and privacy, to a strong interest in building responsible recommender systems. A key element of a successful music recommender system is modelling how users interact with streamed content. By first understanding these interactions, insights can be drawn to enable the construction of more transparent and r…
The role of recommendation systems in the diversity of content consumption on platforms is a much-debated issue. The quantitative state of the art often overlooks the existence of individual attitudes toward guidance, and eventually of different categories of users in this regard. Focusing on the case of music streaming, we analyze the complete listening history of about 9k users over one year and demonstrate that there is no blanket answer to the intertwinement of recommendation use and consumption diversity: it depends on users. First we compute for each user the relative importance of diffe…
Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener…
Popularity-based approaches are widely adopted in music recommendation systems, both in industry and research. However, as the popularity distribution of music items typically is a long-tail distribution, popularity-based approaches to music recommendation fall short in satisfying listeners that have specialized music. The contribution of this article is three-fold. We provide several quantitative measures describing the proximity of a user's music preference to the music mainstream. We define the measures at two levels: relating a listener's music preferences to the global music preferences o…
There are many offline metrics that can be used as a reference for evaluation and optimization of the performance of recommender systems. Hybrid recommendation approaches are commonly used to improve some of those metrics by combining different systems. In this work we focus on music recommendation and propose a new way to improve recommendations, with respect to a desired metric of choice, by combining multiple systems for each user individually based on their expected performance. Essentially, our approach consists in predicting an expected error that each system will produce for each user b…
Recommending the right content in large scale multimedia streaming services is an important and challenging problem that has received much attention in the past decade. A key ingredient for successful recommendations is an effective similarity metric between two objects, and models that leverage the current context to constrain the recommendations. This work proposes a model for random object generation that introduces two key novel elements: (i) a similarity metric based on the distance between objects in a given object sequence, that is also used to measure similarity between meta-data assoc…
