ArticleEPJ data science2025
The impact of playlist characteristics on coherence in user-curated music playlists.
Article in EPJ data science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Music playlist creation is a crucial, yet not fully explored task in music data mining and music information retrieval. Previous studies have largely focused on investigating diversity, popularity, and serendipity of tracks in human- or machine-generated playlists. However, the concept of playlist coherence - vaguely defined as smooth transitions between tracks - remains poorly understood and even lacks a standardized definition. In this paper, we provide a formal definition for measuring playlist coherence based on the sequential ordering of tracks, offering a more interpretable measurement compared to existing literature, and allowing for comparisons between playlists with different musical styles. The presented formal framework to measure coherence is applied to analyze a substantial dataset of user-generated playlists, examining how various playlist characteristics influence coherence. We identified four key attributes: playlist length, number of edits, track popularity, and collaborative playlist curation as potential influencing factors. Using correlation and causal inference models, the impact of these attributes on coherence across ten auditory and one metadata feature are assessed. Our findings indicate that these attributes influence playlist coherence to varying extents. Longer playlists tend to exhibit higher coherence, whereas playlists dominated by popular tracks or those extensively modified by users show reduced coherence. In contrast, collaborative playlist curation yielded mixed results. The insights from this study have practical implications for enhancing recommendation tasks, such as automatic playlist generation and continuation, beyond traditional accuracy metrics. As a demonstration of these findings, we propose a simple greedy algorithm that reorganizes playlists to align coherence with observed trends. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00531-3.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.