On September 9, 2019, Martina McBride published an Instagram Story about her experience trying to build a playlist using the Spotify recommender system. She titled her playlist “Country Music”, and was startled to see that the service was only recommending songs by male artists. McBride refreshed her recommendations 13 times before a song by a women was included in her list of options – a song by Carrie Underwood after 135 songs by male artists. SongData replicated McBride’s experiment. Here’s what we found. … Continue readingReflecting on Spotify’s Recommender System