Discovery Dynamics: Leveraging Repeated Exposure for User and Music Characterization

TL;DR

This paper investigates the repeated exposure effect in music consumption, showing how interest peaks after initial repetitions and declines afterward, and explores how various factors influence this phenomenon to improve music recommendation systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates the presence of the mere exposure effect in music streaming and analyzes factors affecting its magnitude, enabling new user and music characterization methods.

Findings

Interest peaks after initial repetitions

Factors modulate the exposure effect magnitude

Potential for new recommender system paradigms

Abstract

Repetition in music consumption is a common phenomenon. It is notably more frequent when compared to the consumption of other media, such as books and movies. In this paper, we show that one particularly interesting repetitive behavior arises when users are consuming new items. Users' interest tends to rise with the first repetitions and attains a peak after which interest will decrease with subsequent exposures, resulting in an inverted-U shape. This behavior, which has been extensively studied in psychology, is called the mere exposure effect. In this paper, we show how a number of factors, both content and user-based, well documented in the literature on the mere exposure effect, modulate the magnitude of the effect. Due to the vast availability of data of users discovering new songs everyday in music streaming platforms, these findings enable new ways to characterize both the music, users and their relationships. Ultimately, it opens up the possibility of developing new recommender systems paradigms based on these characterizations.