SEA: Search Engines Amsterdam

In this edition of SEA will be on recommender systems with a musical theme.
We have two amazing speakers lined up: Dmitry Moor (Spotify) and Karlijn Dinnissen (Utrecht University).
This will be a hybrid event, the in-person event will take place at Lab42, Science Park, room L3.36.
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IMPORTANT: You will be able to view the Zoom link once you 'attend' the meetup on this page.
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17.00: Dmitry Moor (Spotify)
Title: Exploiting Sequential Music Preferences via Optimisation-Based Sequencing
Abstract: Users in music streaming platforms typically consume tracks sequentially in sessions by interacting with personalised playlists. To satisfy users, music platforms usually rely on recommender systems that learn users' preferences over individual tracks and rank the tracks within each playlist according to the learned preferences. However, such rankings often do not fully exploit the sequential nature of the users' consumption, which may result in a lower within-a-session consumption. In this paper, we model the sequential within-a-session preferences of users and propose an optimisation-based sequencing approach that allows for optimally incorporating such preferences into the rankings. To this end, we rely on interaction data of a major music streaming service to identify two most common aspects of the users' sequential preferences: (1) Position-Aware preferences, and (2) Local-Sequential preferences. We propose a sequencing model that can leverage each of these aspects optimally to maximise the expected total consumption from the session. We further perform an extensive offline and off-policy evaluation of our model, and carry out a large scale online randomised control trial with 7M users across 80 countries. Our findings confirm that we can effectively incorporate sequential preferences of users into our sequencer to make users complete more and skip less tracks within their listening sessions.
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17.30: Karlijn Dinnissen (Utrecht University)
Title: Amplifying Artists’ Voices​ – Musicians’ Perspectives on Influence and Fairness​ of Music Streaming Platforms​
Abstract: The majority of music consumption nowadays takes place on music streaming platforms. Whichever artists, albums, or songs are exposed to consumers on these platforms therefore greatly influences what music is ultimately consumed. As a result, the impact of these platforms on artists—their main item providers—is considerable. However, researchers rarely reach out to item providers directly to shed light on their values and objectives. By omitting this important stakeholder’s point of view, we risk not understanding what artists value most, and might miss first-hand ideas on how to improve streaming platforms and recommender systems. Therefore, we conducted semi-structured interviews to capture the artists’ views. Specifically, we explored artists’ considerations regarding fairness, transparency, and diversity in music recommender systems, and the role artists envision for streaming platforms regarding those topics. In this talk, I will share the results and insights derived from these interviews, as well as offer potential directions for future research and practical applications.

Just keep counting: SEA talks #261 and #262.