Combining usage and content in an online music recommendation system for music in the long-tail

Abstract

In this paper we propose a hybrid music recommender system, which combines usage and content data. We describe an online evaluation experiment performed in real time on a commercial music web site, specialised in content from the very long tail of music content. We compare it against two stand-alone recommenders, the first system based on usage and the second one based on content data. The results show that the proposed hybrid recommender shows advantages with respect to usage- and content-based systems, namely, higher user absolute acceptance rate, higher user activity rate and higher user loyalty. Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2).