Assessing the Impact of Music Recommendation Diversity on Listeners: A Longitudinal Study

TL;DR

This longitudinal study demonstrates that diverse music recommendations can positively influence listeners' openness, attitudes, and curiosity towards Electronic Music over time, challenging pre-existing stereotypes and implicit biases.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence on how long-term exposure to diverse music recommendations impacts listener attitudes and stereotypes, a novel insight in music recommendation research.

Findings

Increased openness to Electronic Music among participants.

Reduction of pre-existing stereotypes and implicit biases.

Enhanced curiosity driven by recommendation diversity.

Abstract

We present the results of a 12-week longitudinal user study wherein the participants, 110 subjects from Southern Europe, received on a daily basis Electronic Music (EM) diversified recommendations. By analyzing their explicit and implicit feedback, we show that exposure to specific levels of music recommendation diversity may be responsible for long-term impacts on listeners' attitudes. In particular, we highlight the function of diversity in increasing the openness in listening to EM, a music genre not particularly known or liked by the participants previous to their participation in the study. Moreover, we demonstrate that recommendations may help listeners in removing positive and negative attachments towards EM, deconstructing pre-existing implicit associations but also stereotypes associated with this music. In addition, our results show the significant clout that recommendation diversity has in generating curiosity in listeners.