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...
Categories for Search & Recommendations
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
Multi-Task Learning of Graph-based Inductive Representations of Music Content
October 29, 2021 5:28 pmPersonalization services at Spotify rely on learning meaningful representations of tracks and users to surface apt recommendations to users in... View Article
Let Me Ask You This: How Can a Voice Assistant Elicit Explicit User Feedback?
October 21, 2021 1:57 pmQuality user feedback is important for making good music recommendations. Recommending the right music to a user at the right... View Article
Spotify’s Contributions to RecSys 2021
September 30, 2021 2:01 pmThe 15th International ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2021) starts this week, and Spotify is excited to be a... View Article
Neural Instant Search for Music and Podcasts
August 30, 2021 3:21 pmTl;dr: Music and podcast search are different, and a carefully designed multi-task model will be essential for search in modern... View Article
User Intents and Satisfaction with Slate Recommendations
July 27, 2021 5:01 pmAn increasingly larger proportion of users rely on recommendation systems to pro-actively serve them recommendations based on diverse user needs... View Article
Spotify’s Contributions to SIGIR 2021
July 13, 2021 9:54 amThe 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2021) starts this week, and Spotify... View Article
Contextual and Sequential User Embeddings for Music Recommendation
April 26, 2021 9:26 pmUsing a music listening dataset from Spotify, we observe that consumption from the recent past and session-level contextual variables (such... View Article
Finding Structure in Users’ Evolving Listening Preferences
April 19, 2021 2:23 pmAt Spotify, we invest into designing recommendation algorithms that allow users to explore the music space more effectively. Recent findings... View Article
Query Understanding for Surfacing Long-Tail Music Content
March 15, 2021 1:30 pmSearch plays an important role in surfacing content in front of users. Typical of most search and recommender systems, there... View Article
Shifting Consumption towards Diverse content via Reinforcement Learning
March 8, 2021 2:23 pmAlgorithmically generated recommendations power and shape the bulk of music consumption on music streaming platforms. The ability to shift consumption... View Article
Algorithmic Effects on the Diversity of Consumption on Spotify
December 3, 2020 10:11 am 9 CommentsOn Spotify, people are spoiled for choice: there are millions of songs by millions of artists that they can listen... View Article