Text2Tracks: Improving Prompt-based Music Recommendations with Generative Retrieval
April 8, 2025 9:22 amImagine asking your music app to “play some old-school rock ballads to relax” and instantly receiving the perfect track recommendation.
Categories for Search & Recommendations
Bridging the Product & Research gap – Part I: Demystifying Product for Researchers
February 4, 2025 11:07 amDeveloping innovative products play an essential part of Spotify’s success...
Bridging Search and Recommendation with Generative Retrieval
October 21, 2024 9:35 amSearch engines and recommendation systems use different signals to represent users and catalog items, catering to their distinct tasks..
Socially-Motivated Music Recommendation
June 6, 2024 10:22 amtldr - The wide variety of reasons people listen to music include both individual motivations, like self-awareness and mood regulation, as well as social motivations, such as demonstrating belonging to a group or feeling connected to friends.
Exploring Local Music’s Place in Global Streaming
May 21, 2024 10:14 amtldr – Music has always been intertwined with place and culture. Now that digital streaming has made it easier than ever to encounter music from all over the world, what role does geography play in people’s relationship to music?
Personalizing Audiobooks and Podcasts with graph-based models
May 10, 2024 10:42 amSpotify's catalog includes millions of music tracks and podcasts and has recently expanded to Audiobooks. Personalizing this content to users requires our algorithms to “understand” user preferences as well as content relationships across all content types...
Estimating long-term outcome of algorithms
May 9, 2024 1:03 pmThere are numerous scenarios where the short- and long-term consequences of an algorithm can differ..
How do people stream newly released music?
May 2, 2024 12:42 pmThe rise of on-demand music streaming supported by novel recommendation algorithms has transformed music listening...
Accelerating Creator Audience Building through Centralized Exploration
February 23, 2024 9:32 amTL;DR: Across a broad spectrum of product features, Spotify’s array of recommender systems play a pivotal role in tailoring personalized user experiences and helping creators grow.
Exploiting Sequential Music Preferences via Optimisation-Based Sequencing
October 26, 2023 11:38 amWe study the problem of constructing personalized playlists for users of music streaming services, in our case Spotify.
Graph Learning for Exploratory Query Suggestions in an Instant Search System
October 25, 2023 10:56 amSpotify’s search system plays a vital role in helping users explore the catalog and discover new content.
Optimizing for the Long-Term Without Delay
July 24, 2023 8:55 amTL;DR: On online platforms such as Spotify, recommender systems are increasingly tasked with improving users’ long-term satisfaction...
Automatic Music Playlist Generation via Simulation-based Reinforcement Learning
July 19, 2023 4:45 pmReinforcement learning (RL) is an established tool for sequential decision making. In this work, we apply RL to solve an automatic music playlist generation problem...
Improving Retrievability in Search with Query Generation
May 4, 2023 9:53 amAllowing users to discover new entities such as books, music, and movies is an important goal for online platforms. This can be achieved for example by recommending entities that the user has not yet interacted with. Another way users can find new entities is by exploring the catalog with the search system.
Exploring Goal-oriented Podcast Recommendations
March 23, 2023 12:51 pmRecommender systems typically look to users' past consumption to predict what they may want next. In practice, this approach tends to work best when what the user wants is similar to what they have consumed recently, and when it is relatively easy for that person to evaluate new items.
Identifying Promising New Podcasts
September 22, 2022 9:05 amA large number of new podcasts are launched every month on Spotify and other online media platforms. In this work,... View Article
Spotify’s Contributions to RecSys 2022
September 14, 2022 2:12 pmHere at Spotify, we are highly dedicated to cutting-edge research in various areas in Machine Learning, User Modeling, Personalization, and... View Article
The Dynamics of Exploration on Spotify
July 26, 2022 12:00 pm“Variety is the spice of life”, as the saying attributed to poet William Cowper goes. People crave heterogeneity and avoid... View Article
The Contribution of Lyrics and Acoustics to Collaborative Understanding of Mood
July 19, 2022 2:49 pmSong lyrics make an important contribution to the musical experience, providing us with rich stories and messages that artists want... View Article
Choice of Implicit Signal Matters: Accounting for User Aspirations in Podcast Recommendations
May 3, 2022 10:06 amPodcasting as a medium is growing exponentially, with hundreds of thousands of shows available in genres from comedy to news... View Article
Mostra: Balancing multiple objectives for music recommendation
April 27, 2022 4:30 pmRecommendation engines support most modern digital platforms, allowing users to navigate vast databases of products in Amazon, homes in AirBnB,... View Article
TastePaths: Enabling deeper exploration and understanding of personal preferences in recommender systems
March 18, 2022 9:30 amExisting recommender systems are limited in the ability to help us grow and understand our personal music preferences Recommender systems... View Article
Modeling Users According to Their Slow and Fast-Moving Interests
February 21, 2022 4:10 pmMusic recommendation systems at Spotify are built on models of users and items. They often rely on past user interactions... View Article
Researching how less-streamed podcasts can reach their potential
January 25, 2022 11:11 amOne question we spend a lot of time thinking about at Spotify is how to help creators build larger audiences,... View Article