Spotify recommender algorithms research blog

A lot has happened in these last ten days.  I managed to do the unthinkable, what I thought was impossible.  Discover new music This aint no Bullshit, the RA didnt hoodwink me here, put me in a personalised illusion, I was actually recommened a brand new genre, seperate from my base recommendations.  Somehow, deep in the brain of the RA, the diversification tools decided to wake up and recommend me this... ( Put hand up ) 'Happy hour'  Filled with Funk and Soul hits from the 60s and 70s.  But thats not all. On top of this, I somehow managed to translate this genre into my base recommendations and it has now become a main stay in my recommendation pool.  Days before this I was sulking, the data I was collecting was very generic and seemed to correlate with mostly everything credible sources online spoke about. You Know, 'Spotify is influencing your music tastes' 'Can you gain control from the algorithm'  Well it seems you can. Not only was I recommended...

Overall this has been an interesting and inciteful look into how a user can navigate their way through Spotify's recommender system. We have examined how users can be pushed into a filter bubble through using Spotify's curated playlist and how the application will create personalised illusions that give the impresion that a user is discovering 'new music'.  I would say my experience with using Spotify's curated playlists was, at times, repetative and lacking variety. I noticed a narrowing effect within the first week of using the application and found that Spotify favours recommending new users contempary mainstream music of today. Later research would prove that Spotify's RA collects data from rising trends and users behaviour on and off the app. (Spotify, No Date) Alongside this, Spotify also state that musicians can pay for their songs to be recommended to targeted users. Stassen offers additonal research proving that artists record labels are influencing per...