User models for multi-context-aware music recommendation

In the last decade, music consumption has changed dramatically as humans have increasingly started to use music streaming platforms. While such platforms provide access to millions of songs, the sheer volume of choices available renders it hard for users to find songs they like. Consequently, the task of finding music the user likes is often mitigated by music recommender systems, which aim to provide recommendations that match the user’s current context. Particularly in the field of music recommendation, adapting recommendations to the user’s current context is critical as, throughout the day, users listen to different music in numerous different contexts and situations. Therefore, we propose a multi-context-aware user model and track recommender system that jointly exploit information about the current situation and musical preferences of users. Our proposed system clusters users based on their situational context features and similarly, clusters music tracks based on their content features. By conducting a series of offline experiments, we show that by relying on Factorization Machines for the computation of recommendations, the proposed multi-context-aware user model successfully leverages interaction effects between user listening histories, situational, and track content information, substantially outperforming a set of baseline recommender systems.