# Track Mix Generation on Music Streaming Services using Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03045 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03045/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [A General Survey on Attention Mechanisms in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14263/) (2022)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search on High Dimensional Data --- Experiments, Analyses, and Improvement (v1.0)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02455/) (2016)
- [Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03208/) (2017)
- [Carousel Personalization in Music Streaming Apps with Contextual Bandits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06546/) (2020)
- [A Semi-Personalized System for User Cold Start Recommendation on Music Streaming Apps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03819/) (2021)
- [Flow Moods: Recommending Music by Moods on Deezer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11229/) (2022)
- [An Analysis of Approaches Taken in the ACM RecSys Challenge 2018 for Automatic Music Playlist Continuation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01520/) (2018)
- [A Scalable Framework for Automatic Playlist Continuation on Music Streaming Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09061/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Algorithmic Collective Action in Recommender Systems: Promoting Songs by Reordering Playlists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04269/) (2024)
- [Let's Get It Started: Fostering the Discoverability of New Releases on Deezer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02827/) (2024)
- [Exploring Large Action Sets with Hyperspherical Embeddings using von Mises-Fisher Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00518/) (2025)
- [Do Recommender Systems Promote Local Music? A Reproducibility Study Using Music Streaming Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16430/) (2024)
- [Music Playlist Captioning at Scale with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22460/) (2026)
- [Privacy in Personalized AI Is a System Property, Not Just a Model Property](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38289/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces Track Mix, a personalized playlist generation system released in 2022 on the music streaming service Deezer. Track Mix automatically generates "mix" playlists inspired by initial music tracks, allowing users to discover music similar to their favorite content. To generate these mixes, we consider a Transformer model trained on millions of track sequences from user playlists. In light of the growing popularity of Transformers in recent years, we analyze the advantages, drawbacks, and technical challenges of using such a model for mix generation on the service, compared to a more traditional collaborative filtering approach. Since its release, Track Mix has been generating playlists for millions of users daily, enhancing their music discovery experience on Deezer.