

Is music recommendation difficult? - chrislo
http://thebreakfastpost.com/2012/01/13/is-music-recommendation-difficult

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angdis
I think it is a difficult problem. Much of the difficulty is just framing the
question in a philosophical sense.

The article talks about music recommendations based on a user's previous
music-listening habits but what about recommendations based NOT on previous
listening habits? I guess it depends on if the point of music recommendations
is to "drill down" on a particular genre or related sub-genre.

In general music recommendations can also be made based on interests in
literature or aesthetics or even historical topics. They can also be based on
absence of experience-- how do you know if you've optimized globally if you
haven't seen the spectrum of possibilities?

Finally, there's the question of what constitutes "success". Is it possible
for someone to appreciate a recommendation even if they don't like it (as in
"thumbs up" like it)? Aesthetic tastes are far more complex than like/dis-
like.

I realize that these considerations aren't necessarily amenable to a pure
computational approach. Perhaps the answer lies in using human decisions and
computation together, like last.fm scrobbling?

