Embarrassed by your Spotify Wrapped? Here’s how to bring more diversity to your playlists!
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Last week, Spotify Wrapped started popping up on social media and in group chats again. Spotify Wrapped – which has become an annual tradition – is a personalized summary of what you listened to that year on Spotify. People share their top lists to show their good taste in music or to share their embarrassment about listening to cheesy pop songs. But how do you make your musical taste more diverse?
Your own musical bubble
Spotify has excellent recommender algorithms that help people to find music they like. But as with any recommender system, chances are that you get locked in on a specific taste or genre, and that you listen mostly within your own bubble. Spotify actively encourages listeners to explore new music, for example with their “Discover Weekly” playlist that helps you explore fresh music based on your current musical preferences. But those recommendations are typically still close to what you normally listen to.
How to broaden your musical horizon
The Spotify Wrapped makes people aware that they might want to broaden their musical horizon. But where to start if you are up for a change and want to explore new music genres? Standard recommender tools base their predictions on your historical listening behavior. These tools have difficulty helping you explore new music or other music genres than you’re used to. Yu Liang, PhD student at JADS, developed an interactive music genre exploration tool. The tool extends current recommender approaches, by allowing users to explore new genres in a personalized way.
Get personalized recommendations
Martijn Willemsen, researcher at JADS and supervisor of Yu, explains: “You can login to our tool with your own Spotify account, choose a genre that you want to explore and then our tool will provide you with a playlist from that genre that matches your own music preferences. The tool allows you to control how personalized you like these recommendations to be.”
Were you a bit embarrassed by your Spotify Wrapped? Start exporing new genres and make next years’ spotifyWrapped more diverse!
More information
The Genre Exploration Tool was developed as part of the PhD project of Yu Liang at JADS, Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, Den Bosch and supervised by Martijn Willemsen, working at JADS and Human-Technology Interaction, IE&IS. Eindhoven University of Technology. The work was published recently at the RecSys 2021 conference
Liang, Y., & Willemsen, M. C. (2021). The role of preference consistency, defaults and musical expertise in users’ exploration behavior in a genre exploration recommender. In RecSys 2021 – 15th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 230-240). Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460231.3474253
