A cross-cultural study of criteria in the music playlist generation

Abstract

In the previous ten years, music streaming platforms have grown in popularity and generated significant revenue for the music business. They offer a variety of functions, one of which is the ability to create music playlists. The purpose of this study was to look into how consumers behave during this process as well as when listening to music. Aside from that, the study looked into listeners' cultural backgrounds and how they influenced the aforementioned aspects. People's birth country was linked to their cultural background in this study. The goal of distributing a questionnaire-based survey was to collect replies from consumers from various nations. Following the collecting of nearly 350 responses, 276 responses from Greece and the Netherlands were analyzed. There appeared to be differences in the preferred music styles and the use of music services. However, during the creation of a music playlist, the behaviour was nearly the same. The mood of the listeners, as well as the music genre and artist of the songs, were the most important variables in generating a list that would provoke a shared sentiment when played. Furthermore, rather than relying on the recommendation algorithms, many of the participants choose to create their own music playlists and pick songs one by one for their hand-crafted playlists. Proposed ideas for future recommender system designs discuss this non-preference. In addition, suggested features for music platforms based on the study's findings are presented.