Real-time music recommendations for new users with Amazon SageMaker Amazon Web Services

This is a guest post from Matt Fielder and Jordan Rosenblum at iHeartRadio. In their own words, "iHeartRadio is a streaming audio service that reaches tens of millions of users every month and registers many tens of thousands more every day." Personalization is an important part of the user experience, and we aspire to give useful recommendations as early in the user lifecycle as possible. Music suggestions that are surfaced directly after registration let our users know that we can quickly adapt to their tastes and reduce the likelihood of churn. But how do we personalize content to a user that doesn't yet have any listening history?