Programme driven music radio

Abstract

This paper describes the operation of and research behind a networked application for the delivery of personalised streams of music at Trinity College Dublin. Smart Radio is a web based client-server application that uses streaming audio technology and recommendation techniques to allow users build, manage and share music programmes. While it is generally acknowledged that music distribution over the web will dramatically change how the music industry operates, there are few prototypes available to demonstrate how this could work in a regulated way. The Smart Radio approach is to have people manage their music resources by putting together personalised music programmes. These programmes can then be recommended to other listeners using a combination of collaborative and contentbased recommendation strategies. We describe how we use a novel two-stage approach to find recommendations that are pertinent to a listener?s current listening preferences, something which collaborative techniques are insensitive to. We describe additional constraints required to provide a service personalized to each user?s listening preferences. The Smart Radio system currently runs within the Computer Science Intranet with permission from the National Music Rights Organisation It is a prototype system for an "always on" high bandwidth Internet connection such as ADSL.