Harry Chapin and RATM: the problem with bleeding interests
Note: this post requires a basic familiarity with the songs discussed. If you’re not familiar with them, I’d recommend you listen to at least a portion of the following three songs:
There are many musical genres I like, and what I listen to usually depends on my mood at the time. Some days, I want to listen to Miles Davis, and some days, I want to listen to Slayer.
Some days, I just want to play some normcore Southern rock. The other day, I opened Spotify, went to Free Bird, and selected “Go to radio”. It gave me a playlist, and after playing on shuffle for a few songs, I realized something was wrong.
What’s the problem here? It’s a little tag at the top of the playlist, just out of sight in that screenshot: “Made for Alex”.
Let me start the rest of this complaint with full acknowledgement that I have nearly zero knowledge of recommendation algorithms. But, to me, this is a problem with personalized recommendations that are over-indexed on your interests. In particular, when these interests are very disparate; I don’t think I would ever expect a human to create a playlist with nearly polar vibe opposites Cat’s in the Cradle and Killing In The Name. Though they can be loosely connected to the song the playlist was based off of, they clearly don’t fit together.
