Local Music Event Recommendation with Long Tail Artists

In this paper, we explore the task of local music event recommendation. Many local artists tend to be obscure long-tail artists with a small digital footprint. That is, it can be hard to find social tag and artist similarity information for many of the artists who are playing shows in the local music community. To address this problem, we explore using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to embed artists and tags into a latent feature space and examine how well artists with small digital footprints are represented in this space. We find that only a relatively small digital footprint is needed to effectively model artist similarity. We also introduce the concept of a Music Event Graph as a data structure that makes it easy and efficient to recommend events based on user-selected genre tags and popular artists. Finally, we conduct a small user study to explore the feasibility of our proposed system for event recommendation.