Recommending music on Spotify with deep learning

In this post, I'll explain my approach and show some preliminary results. This is going to be a long post, so here's an overview of the different sections. If you want to skip ahead, just click the section title to go there. Traditionally, Spotify has relied mostly on collaborative filtering approaches to power their recommendations. The idea of collaborative filtering is to determine the users' preferences from historical usage data. For example, if two users listen to largely the same set of songs, their tastes are probably similar. Conversely, if two songs are listened to by the same group of users, they probably sound similar. This kind of information can be exploited to make recommendations.