Tailoring Music Recommendations to Users by Considering Diversity, Mainstreaminess, and Novelty

A shortcoming of current approaches for music recommendation is that they consider user-specific characteristics only on a very simple level, typically as some kind of interaction between users and items when employing collaborative filtering. To alleviate this issue, we propose several user features that model aspects of the user's music listening behavior: diversity, mainstreaminess, and novelty of the user's music taste. To validate the proposed features, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of a variety of music recommendation approaches (stand-alone and hybrids) on a collection of almost 200 million listening events gathered from {Last.fm}. We report first results and highlight cases where our diversity, mainstreaminess, and novelty features can be beneficially integrated into music recommender systems.