Characterisation of explicit feedback in an online music recommendation service

Abstract

In this paper, we present our study and characterisation of explicit and implicit feedback on Last.fm, an online music station and recommender service. The dataset consisted of explicit positive feedback (through loved tracks) and implicit positive feedback (the number of times a track is played). As one would expect, our analysis shows that explicit feedback is very scarce. However, we also found that the rate at which a user provides explicit feedback decreases with time, and that overall leaving explicit feedback has a negative effect on the user's behaviour.