Diversity in the Music Listening Experience: Insights from Focus Group Interviews

TL;DR

This study explores how music listeners perceive and interact with diversity in music recommendations through qualitative interviews, providing insights into user perceptions and factors influencing diversity assessment.

Contribution

It offers new qualitative insights into user perceptions of diversity in music recommendations, complementing existing technical approaches.

Findings

Listeners' perception of diversity is influenced by genre, artist familiarity, and personal preferences.

Factors affecting interaction include listening context and individual diversity attitudes.

Listeners' assessment of diversity varies widely based on subjective criteria.

Abstract

Music listening in today's digital spaces is highly characterized by the availability of huge music catalogues, accessible by people all over the world. In this scenario, recommender systems are designed to guide listeners in finding tracks and artists that best fit their requests, having therefore the power to influence the diversity of the music they listen to. Albeit several works have proposed new techniques for developing diversity-aware recommendations, little is known about how people perceive diversity while interacting with music recommendations. In this study, we interview several listeners about the role that diversity plays in their listening experience, trying to get a better understanding of how they interact with music recommendations. We recruit the listeners among the participants of a previous quantitative study, where they were confronted with the notion of diversity when asked to identify, from a series of electronic music lists, the most diverse ones according to their beliefs. As a follow-up, in this qualitative study we carry out semi-structured interviews to understand how listeners may assess the diversity of a music list and to investigate their experiences with music recommendation diversity. We report here our main findings on 1) what can influence the diversity assessment of tracks and artists' music lists, and 2) which factors can characterize listeners' interaction with music recommendation diversity.