The article G. Bonnin and D. Jannach – Automated Generation of Music Playlists: Survey and Experiments, ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 47, No. 2, Article 26 is now available online.
The paper is a detailed survey on playlist generation. First, different generation algorithms and the different types of data they can use are classified, the common approaches for the evaluation of the quality of the generated playlists are reviewed. In a second part, the results of thorough experiments are presented in which several existing algorithms are compared using several evaluation approaches. The results suggest that the order of the tracks, artist information, and track popularity are three important criteria to take into account when generating playlists and that some existing evaluation approaches have their limitations.