Scaling up music playlist generation

Abstract

The issue of generating automatically sequences of music titles that satisfy arbitrary criteria such as user preferences has gained interest recently, because of the numerous applications in the field of electronic music distribution. All the approaches proposed so far suffer from two main drawbacks: reduced expressiveness and incapacity to handle large music catalogues. We present in this paper a system that is able to produce automatically music playlists out of large, real catalogues (up to 200000 titles), and that can handle arbitrarily complex criteria. We describe the basic algorithm and its adaptation to playlist generation, and report on experiments performed in the context of the European project Cuidado.