Towards Effective Exploration/Exploitation in Sequential Music Recommendation
This work addresses the explore/exploit trade-off in sequential music recommendation for streaming services, but it appears incremental as it focuses on specific sequence effects without claiming major breakthroughs.
The study investigated how the sequence of ads and songs in a music streaming session affects listener behavior, finding that prior sequences influence song exploration and the likelihood of session interruption.
Music streaming companies collectively serve billions of songs per day. Radio-based music services may intersperse audio advertisements among the songs as a means to generate revenue, much like traditional FM radio. Regardless of the monetization approach, the recommender system should decide when to play content that the listener is known to enjoy (exploit) and content that is novel to the listener (explore). Recommender systems that rely on this explore/exploit type framework have been deployed in a wide variety of applications such as movies, books, music, shopping and more. In this work, we investigate the impact of different ad/song sequences on listener behavior. In particular, we focus on the impact of exploring new song content for the listener given the previous sequence of ads and songs in the listener's session. Our results show that the prior sequence matters when considering song exploration and that this prior sequence has an impact on the listener's tendency to interrupt their current session.