Do they know it’s Christmas time?
It’s (fortunately) out of season now, but there’s an interesting post on 538 about how Christmas music is detected, selected and played.
For example, the impact on algorithms that discover new hits or new performers:
The discovery algorithm searches for situations when the popularity of a song rises substantially faster than the popularity of the song’s artist. This becomes a problem in November, because Spotify starts seeing “Home for the Holidays” crooner Perry Como — who has been dead for 13 years — suddenly start behaving like an indie band out of Portland, Oregon, that’s about to make it big.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Which you refuse to link to :-P
9 years ago
Of course. It’s got Jingle Bell Rock (shudders)
9 years ago