Qualitative Research Methods

The artists' perspective on music recommender systems

Idea

Music recommender systems are used in streaming services (e.g., Spotify, YouTube); they recommend music to users based on their musical taste, listening activity, or mood. Some examples of recommender systems are automatic playlist generation (e.g., Spotify’s personalized ‘Discover Weekly’ or unpersonalized ‘Popular Music from the 90s’), suggestions to add tracks to an existing playlist, or artists suggested based on your previous listening behavior. This project aims to identify potential problems that affect artists and draw on your ideas about how you would like future recommender systems to work. 

Supervisor: Christine Bauer
24 July 2024
The artists' perspective on music recommender systems
User behavior types of music playlist creation: How do users create music playlists on music streaming services?

Idea

Today’s music streaming services (e.g., Spotify, Deezer) allow users to create music playlists. Little is known about how users approach and accomplish this playlist-creation task. Previous research indicates that users employ different strategies to create playlists. The goal is to explore and capture users’ (different) strategies and processes to craft their playlists. Specific aspects include a user’s search strategy and the use of automatic recommendations in the playlist creation process. Particular attention should be paid to using other user interface (UI) elements and functionalities—either in the elements’ intended way or as a workaround. The outcome should be (i) a typology of user behavior of music playlist creation and (ii) derived design implications to support music playlist creation (if possible, for the different user types).

Supervisor: Christine Bauer
24 July 2024
User behavior types of music playlist creation: How do users create music playlists on music streaming services?
What do professional musicians or music students consider when creating/organizing music playlists?

Idea

Many music professionals create their playlists (e.g., on music streaming platforms such as Spotify or Pandora or in their music software) for various professional purposes—e.g., for teaching music students, learning to play/sing new songs, creating playlists for events, etc.
The guiding research question is: What do professional musicians or music students consider when creating/organizing a playlist?
The goal of the project is to find out what aspects are important when creating and organizing a playlist - important from the music professionals’ perspective. Ultimately, these findings can be used to develop playlist recommenders or music continuation approaches (e.g., when you start with one or several music items and then the playlist is automatically continued) that consider those aspects. The results might differ significantly from what a typical consumer may consider important.

Supervisor: Christine Bauer
24 July 2024
What do professional musicians or music students consider when creating/organizing music playlists?