# 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. +