If you like the beatles you might like...: a tutorial on music recommendation

As the world of online music grows, music recommendation systems become an increasingly important way for music listeners to discover new music. Commercial recommenders such as Last.fm and Pandora have enjoyed commercial and critical success. But how well do these systems really work? How good are the recommendations? How far into the Long Tail do these recommenders reach? In this tutorial we look at the current state-of-the-art in music recommendation. We examine current commercial and research systems, focusing on the advantages and the disadvantages of the various recommendation strategies. We look at some of the challenges in building music recommenders and we explore some of the ways that Multimedia Information Retrieval techniques can be used to improve future recommenders, including a multi-modal approach merging the different fields (audio, image, video and text).