Let Me Introduce You: Stimulating Taste-Broadening Serendipity Through Song Introductions

TL;DR

This study investigates how immersive song introductions can enhance exploration and diversity in music listening by stimulating interest in unfamiliar songs.

Contribution

It demonstrates that narrative transportation significantly boosts taste-broadening serendipity, highlighting the role of song introductions in music recommendation systems.

Findings

Transportation predicts taste-broadening serendipity more strongly than cognitive elaboration.

Cognitive elaboration has a weaker but still positive effect on interest in new songs.

Song introductions can facilitate exploration and diversity in music streaming.

Abstract

Research on how people experience music emphasizes the importance of exploration and diversity in listening. However, music recommender systems struggle with facilitating exploration. Even when music recommender systems are able to recommend something valuable to users that is outside their typical preferences, it still remains difficult to spark their interest. This paper presents a user study examining the efficacy of immersive and informative introductions in stimulating interest in songs that are beyond one's usual preferences, an experience called Taste-Broadening Serendipity. We uncover two important mechanisms behind the effect of introductions: transportation and cognitive elaboration. Our findings indicate that transportation (i.e., being absorbed into a narrative world) is the strongest predictor of Taste-Broadening Serendipity, while cognitive elaboration (i.e., learning something new about the artist or social context in which the music emerged) has a weaker effect but is easier to stimulate. We propose that song introductions can play an important role in facilitating exploration and increasing diversity of listening on music streaming platforms.