Learning music embedding with metadata for context aware recommendation

Contextual factors can benefit music recommendation and retrieval tasks remarkably. However, how to acquire and utilize the contextual information still need to be studied. In this paper, we propose a context aware music recommendation approach, which can recommend music appropriate for users' contextual preference for music. In analogy to matrix factorization methods for collaborative filtering, the proposed approach does not require songs to be described by features beforehand, but it learns music pieces' embeddings (vectors in low-dimensional continuous space) from music playing records and corresponding metadata and infer users' general and contextual preference for music from their playing records with the learned embedding. Then, our approach can recommend appropriate music pieces. Experimental evaluations on a real world dataset show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline methods. Copyright © 2016 ACM.