|Talks|

Link Me Baby One More Time: Social Music Discovery on Spotify 

Visiting speaker
Hybrid
Past Talk
Shazia’Ayn Babul
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford
May 14, 2025
11:00 am
May 14, 2025
11:00 am
In-person
Moretown
109
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
109
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Moretown
Room
109
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

We explore the social and contextual factors that influence the outcome of person-to-person music recommendations and discovery. Specifically, we use data from Spotify to investigate how a link sent from one user to another results in the receiver engaging with the music of the shared artist. We consider several factors that may influence this process, such as the strength of the sender-receiver relationship, the user's role in the Spotify social network, their music social cohesion, and how similar the new artist is to the receiver's taste. We find that the receiver of a link is more likely to engage with a new artist when (1) they have similar music taste to the sender and the shared track is a good fit for their taste, (2) they have a stronger and more intimate tie with the sender, and (3) the shared artist is popular amongst the receiver's connections. Finally, we use these findings to build a Random Forest classifier to predict whether a shared music track will result in the receiver's engagement with the shared artist. This model elucidates which type of social and contextual features are most predictive, although peak performance is achieved when a diverse set of features are included. These findings provide new insights into the multifaceted mechanisms underpinning the interplay between music discovery and social processes.
About the speaker
Shazia’Ayn Babul is a fourth-year DPhil student at the University of Oxford’s Mathematical Institute, supervised by Prof. Renaud Lambiotte. Her work focuses on network science primarily applied to social networks with diverse tie attributes. Her thesis spans topics such as developing algorithms to extract insights from social networks with negative weights (signed networks) and modeling processes that unfold on social networks with multiple types of relationships. During her DPhil, she has held a placement at the Alan Turing Institute as part of the Enrichment Scheme and completed an internship with Spotify’s Research Science team.
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May 14, 2025