Research Seminars

Last.fm: how to organize digital music in a large social network

Norman Casagrande
Head of Music Research, Last.fm

Wednesday 2nd May 2007, 4:00pm, Room 338, Computer Science Department

Important note: This seminar is not the usual room: It is in room 338 in the Computer Science Department.
Directions of how to get to the Computer Science department at Queen Mary are available at: http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/about/findus

Abstract

In the last few years digital music has transformed the landscape of music experience and distribution. It is not uncommon to find personal music collections that exceed thousands of tracks, and thanks to the Internet finding and accessing music has become simpler than ever. As a result, it is becoming increasingly harder to arrange and navigate the large databases of music that are available to the user.

Last.fm is an online music community that operates in that space. We have a large set of data which includes user listening habits and audio data. This data is processed though a series of tools which include statistical, combinatorial and audio analysis that allow us to provide recommendations, create playlists, measure user/items similarity, apply spam filtering, and more.

In this talk we will be giving a overview of some of the problems we are
confronted with, and our approaches to solve them.