Understanding Music Playlists

As music streaming services dominate the music industry, the playlist is becoming an increasingly crucial element of music consumption. Con- sequently, the music recommendation problem is often casted as a playlist generation prob- lem. Better understanding of the playlist is there- fore necessary for developing better playlist gen- eration algorithms. In this work, we analyse two playlist datasets to investigate some com- monly assumed hypotheses about playlists. Our findings indicate that deeper understanding of playlists is needed to provide better prior infor- mation and improve machine learning algorithms in the design of recommendation systems.