  Music streaming companies collectively serve billions of songs per day.
Radio-based music services may intersperse audio advertisements among the songs
as a means to generate revenue, much like traditional FM radio. Regardless of
the monetization approach, the recommender system should decide when to play
content that the listener is known to enjoy (exploit) and content that is novel
to the listener (explore). Recommender systems that rely on this
explore/exploit type framework have been deployed in a wide variety of
applications such as movies, books, music, shopping and more. In this work, we
investigate the impact of different ad/song sequences on listener behavior. In
particular, we focus on the impact of exploring new song content for the
listener given the previous sequence of ads and songs in the listener's
session. Our results show that the prior sequence matters when considering song
exploration and that this prior sequence has an impact on the listener's
tendency to interrupt their current session.
