This study examines homophily on Last.fm based on users’ preferences for mainstream, novel, or diverse music content. We compare friendship connections to listening profiles and evaluate these features for link prediction. Results show that friends share similar artist preferences, with diversity being a stronger predictor of friendship than mainstream or novelty preferences. While high-novelty users show strong homophily, they have lower artist profile similarity. Mainstream/novel/diverse features perform comparably to artist profiles in link prediction, with combined features yielding best results—though adding no value when graph-based features are available. These insights inform music recommendation, user modeling, and cold-start link prediction.
Tomislav Đuričić,
Dominik Kowald,
Markus Schedl,
Elisabeth Lex
