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the world of music. Musicians use inexpensive personal computers instead of expensive recording studios to record, mix, and engineer music. Musicians use the Internet to distribute their music for free instead of spending large amounts of money creating CDs, hiring trucks, and shipping them to hundreds of record stores. As the cost to create and distribute recorded music has dropped, the amount of available music has grown dramatically. Twenty years ago a typical record store would have music by fewer than ten thousand artists, while today online music stores have music catalogs by nearly a million artists. With so much more music available, listeners are increasingly relying on tools such as automatic music recommenders to help them find, organize, and experience their music. While the amount of new music has grown, some of the traditional ways of finding music have diminished. Thirty years ago, the local radio DJ was a music tastemaker, finding new and interesting music for the local radio audience. Now radio shows are programmed by large corporations that create playlists drawn from a limited pool of tracks. Similarly, record stores have been replaced by big box retailers that have ever-shrinking music departments. In the past, you could always ask the owner of the record store for music recommendations. You would learn what was new, what was good, and what was selling. Now, however, you can no longer expect that the teenager behind the cash register will be an expert in new music or even be someone who listens to music at all. To fill the gap left by the departing radio DJs and record store clerks, listeners are turning to machines to guide them to new music. As we rely more and more on automatic music recommendation it is important for us to understand what makes a good music recommender and how a recommender can affect the world of music. With this knowledge we can build systems that offer novel, relevant, and interesting music recommendations drawn from the entire world of available music. In this article we describe some of the primary ways music Articles