The role of serendipity in user-curated music playlists

In this paper, we study the role of serendipity in music playlists. Serendipity is an important construct in recommendations, and finding an indicator of serendipity in a user-created playlist can facilitate the recommendation task. In particular, we want to know how the serendipity level of playlists is affected by the creator's ability and by the context they are created. To do so, we (1) measure the serendipity level of music playlists using a previously established Linked Open Data-based approach, (2) assess whether the ability of the creator of the playlists has an effect on the serendipity level, and (3) assess whether different contexts facilitate a higher or lower serendipity level of playlists. The serendipity level of playlists is calculated with the cosine distance between Linked Open Data Paths that connect the songs contained in the playlist. The ability of the creator to generate serendipitous recommendations is estimated by measuring his/her coping potential and assessing the genre diversity of listening history. We instrument a study using a Spotify playlists dataset. Previous results in different contexts suggest that the coping potential is a good proxy for the curiosity level of a person, and, in turn, for the diversified knowledge this person has. Our analyses confirm these findings also in the music context: we find that playlist creators with higher coping potential have a more diversified knowledge. They create a higher number of playlists that span across multiple contexts and genres. Conversely, a lower copying potential implies a lower number of less coherent playlists.

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