# HG changeset patch # User Paulo Chiliguano
- Music consumption is biased towards a few popular artists. For instance, in 2007 only 1\% of - all digital tracks accounted for 80\% of all sales. Similarly, 1,000 albums accounted for 50\% - of all album sales, and 80\% of all albums sold were purchased less than 100 times. There is - a need to assist people to filter, discover, personalise and recommend from the huge amount - of music content available along the Long Tail. -
- Current music recommendation algorithms try to - accurately predict what people demand to listen to. However, quite - often these algorithms tend to recommend popular -or well-known to the - user- music, decreasing the effectiveness of the recommendations. These - approaches focus on improving the accuracy of the recommendations. That - is, try to make - accurate predictions about what a user could listen to, or buy next, - independently of how - useful to the user could be the provided recommendations. -
- In this Thesis we stress the importance of the user{\textquoteright}s - perceived quality of the recommendations. We model the Long Tail curve - of artist popularity to predict -potentially- - interesting and unknown music, hidden in the tail of the popularity - curve. Effective recommendation systems should promote novel and - relevant material (non-obvious recommendations), taken primarily from - the tail of a popularity distribution. -
- The main contributions of this Thesis are: (i) a novel network-based approach for - recommender systems, based on the analysis of the item (or user) similarity graph, and the - popularity of the items, (ii) a user-centric evaluation that measures the user{\textquoteright}s relevance - and novelty of the recommendations, and (iii) two prototype systems that implement the - ideas derived from the theoretical work. Our findings have significant implications for - recommender systems that assist users to explore the Long Tail, digging for content they - might like. -