Learning Playlist Representations for Automatic Playlist Generation

Abstract: Spotify is currently the worlds leading music streaming ser-vice. As the leader in music streaming the task of providing listeners with music recommendations is vital for Spotify. Listening to playlists is a popular way of consuming music, but traditional recommender systems tend to fo-cus on suggesting songs, albums or artists rather than pro-viding consumers with playlists generated for their needs. This thesis presents a scalable and generalizeable approach to music recommendation that performs song selection for the problem of playlist generation. The approach selects tracks related to a playlist theme by finding the charac-terizing variance for a seed playlist and projects candidate songs into the corresponding subspace. Quantitative re-sults shows that the model outperforms a baseline which is taking the full variance into account. By qualitative results the model is also shown to outperform professionally curated playlists in some cases.