[ZoomZoomZoom]

Even though the idea of recommendations is anything but new, literally nothing and nowhere works as expected. The only thing that comes close is based on the concept of neighbours, as implemented at Last.fm or RateYourMusic.

I don't understand why is it so hard to offer something along these lines:

  1. Define dominant user preferences by clustering and segmenting the field of listened genres.
  2. Build a list of relevant "neighbours":
    2.1 Manually added users/friends
    2.2 For each of the dominant genre preferences, find users with a high level of artist intersection within that genre and add them
  3. Now, for a "find similar" query:
    3.1 Define a reasonable time window
    3.2 For each neighbour, find points in time when they listened to the queried track/artist
    3.3 Build a list of tracks/artist from the defined window around the points found
    3.4 Filter tracks/artists that are too "distant" on the general genre/tag map, or lie outside of the user's dominant preferences (with a degree of boundary feathering, perhaps)
    3.5 Filter if similar to negative part of the query
    3.6 If novelty is required: filter artists/tracks according to the degree of their presence in the user's history

[resource_waste]

I think the financial incentives to promote specific artists (or songs with ads in them "GUCCI!") become the focus pretty quickly.

The cost to play a song is expensive, so if you can actually profit by putting a new artist instead of paying, why wouldn't you?

Sure your customer gets 3 minutes of potential garbage, but they don't realize that they generated revenue for the company just by sitting through that song.

If you give your customers a great experience, they are going to listen to more music, which is bad for the bottom line.

There doesnt seem to be any competition due to IP laws, so there is no incentive to be good.

[chillingeffect]

Confounding factors are

1. The curse of dimensionality when computong distance functions and

2. The cost function of a bad song. People get mad if they get too many things they don't like. Notice Pandora immediately sends you back to the band that seeded a station upon any thunbs down.