A combinatorial approach to content-based music selection

Advances in networking and transmission of digital multimedia data will soon bring huge catalogues of music to users. Accessing these catalogues raises a problem for users and content providers, that we define as the music selection problem. We introduce three main goals to be satisfied in music selection: match user preferences, provide users with new music, and exploit the catalogue in an optimal fashion. We propose a novel approach to music selection, based on computing coherent sequences of music titles, and show that this amounts to solving a combinatorial pattern generation problem. We propose constraint satisfaction techniques to solve it. The resulting system is an enabling technology to build better music delivery services.