Sharing and Combining listening Experience: a Social Approach to Web Radio

We present Poolcasting, a social Web radio architecture in which the group of listeners is able to influence in real time the music played on each channel. Poolcasting users contribute to the radio with songs they own, create radio channels and evaluate the proposed music, while an automatic intelligent technique schedules each channel with a group-customised sequence of musically associated songs. This technique works both with active users, who explicitly state their musical preferences, and with passive users, whose musical preferences are inferred from the analysis of their personal music libraries. The radio dynamically generates and streams on each channel a sequence of songs where the preferences of all the current listeners are combined together, with an approach that promotes fairness among listeners with different tastes.