Tracing Affordance and Item Adoption on Music Streaming Platforms

TL;DR

This study investigates how users adopt different platform affordances and recommendations on music streaming services over two years, revealing diverse behaviors and complex adoption patterns that challenge one-size-fits-all assumptions.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of user behavior regarding affordance and recommendation adoption, highlighting the heterogeneity and complexity of user interactions on music streaming platforms.

Findings

Users exhibit diverse adoption behaviors.

No universal pattern for recommendation adoption.

Behavior varies with individual usage over time.

Abstract

Popular music streaming platforms offer users a diverse network of content exploration through a triad of affordances: organic, algorithmic and editorial access modes. Whilst offering great potential for discovery, such platform developments also pose the modern user with daily adoption decisions on two fronts: platform affordance adoption and the adoption of recommendations therein. Following a carefully constrained set of Deezer users over a 2-year observation period, our work explores factors driving user behaviour in the broad sense, by differentiating users on the basis of their temporal daily usage, adoption of the main platform affordances, and the ways in which they react to them, especially in terms of recommendation adoption. Diverging from a perspective common in studies on the effects of recommendation, we assume and confirm that users exhibit very diverse behaviours in using and adopting the platform affordances. The resulting complex and quite heterogeneous picture demonstrates that there is no blanket answer for adoption practices of both recommendation features and recommendations.