Location-adapted music recommendation using tags

Abstract

Context-aware music recommender systems are capable to suggest music items taking into consideration contextual conditions, such as the user mood or location, that may influence the user preferences at a particular moment. In this paper we consider a particular kind of context aware recommendation task - selecting music content that fits a place of interest (POI). To address this problem we have used emotional tags attached by a users' population to both music and POIs. Moreover, we have considered a set of similarity metrics for tagged resources to establish a match between music tracks and POIs. In order to test our hypothesis, i.e., that the users will reckon that a music track suits a POI when this track is selected by our approach, we have designed a live user experiment where subjects are repeatedly presented with POIs and a selection of music tracks, some of them matching the presented POI and some not. The results of the experiment show that there is a strong overlap between the users' selections and the best matching music that is recommended by the system for a POI. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.