Using personalized radio to enhance local music discovery

We explore the use of personalized radio to facilitate the discovery of music created by local artists. We describe a system called MegsRadio.fm that produces a customizable stream of music by both local and well-known (non-local) artists based on seed artists, tags, venues and/or location. We hypothesize that the more popular artists provide context for introducing new music by more obscure local artists. We also suggest that both the easy-to-use and serendipitous nature of the radio model are advantageous when designing a system to help individuals discover new music. Finally, we describe an interactive map that features personalized event recommendations based on the user's listening history. Results from a small-scale user study indicate that users are more aware of the local music scene after using it, discover relevant local music events, and would recommend the experience to others.