Music Recommendation with Large Language Models: Challenges, Opportunities, and Evaluation

Abstract

Music Recommender Systems (MRSs) have long relied on an information retrieval framing, where progress is measured mainly through accuracy on retrieval-oriented subtasks. While effective, this reductionist paradigm struggles to address the deeper question of what makes a good recommendation. Attempts to broaden evaluation, through user studies or fairness analyses, have had limited impact. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) disrupts this framework: LLMs are generative rather than ranking-based, making standard accuracy metrics questionable. They also introduce challenges such as hallucinations, knowledge cutoffs, non-determinism, and opaque training data, rendering traditional train/test protocols difficult to interpret. At the same time, LLMs create new opportunities, enabling natural language (NL) interaction and even allowing models to act as evaluators. This work argues that the shift toward LLM-driven MRSs requires rethinking evaluation. We first review how LLMs have impacted user modeling, item modeling, and NL-based recommendation in music. We then analyze evaluation practices from NLP, highlighting methodologies and open challenges relevant to MRSs. Finally, we synthesize insights, focusing on how LLM prompting applies to MRSs, to outline a structured set of success and risk dimensions. Our goal is to provide the MRSs community with an updated, pedagogical, and cross-disciplinary perspective on evaluation.