Is music recommendation special?
Over lunch, after the Pop and Policy Music Recommendation panel session on Saturday, one of the panelists (I don't recall who) raised the question: "Is music recommendation different than other kinds of recommendation? Is music recommendation special?" Since all of us were in the business of music recommendation, we all quickly agreed that it was special... but is it really? What distinguishes music recommendation from book or movie recommendation? Is it a harder problem? Is it any more or less relevant than any other recommender. Certainly there are some obvious differences between music and other types of media. Where we may read a book or watch a movie just once (or maybe twice), music is re-used many times - we can listen to the same song over an over again (ask the parent of any 12 year old about this). There is much more music content than other types of media - there are millions and millions of music tracks, while Netflix offers less than 100K movies. Music is used in many different contexts: we may have playlists for exercise, playlists for a romantic dinner, playlists for work or studying. We don't go to Amazon to find a book to read while jogging. Song order can be very important, while the order for movies or books is less important (unless you are watching a series of course).
Music is different - but does that mean that music recommenders are different? Does a good recommender for music need to do anything special because it is recommending music?