Exploring online music listening behaviors of musically sophisticated users

Abstract

Due to the rise of available online music, a lot of music consumption is moving from traditional offline media to online sources. Online music sources offer almost an unlimited music collection to its users. Hence, how music is consumed by users (e.g., experts) may differ from traditional offline sources. In this work we explored how musically sophisticated users (i.e. experts) consume online music in terms of diversity. To analyze this, we gathered data from two different sources: Last.fm and Spotify. As expertise is defined by the ubiquitousness of experiences, we calculated different diversity measurements to explore how ubiquitous (in terms of diversity) the listening behaviors of users are. We found that different musical sophistication levels correspond to applying diversity related to specific kind of musical characteristics (i.e., artist or genre). Our results can provide knowledge on how systems should be designed to provide better support to expert users.