February 26, 2014

Exploring music preferences

One of the challenges faced by a music streaming service is to figure out what music to play for the brand-new listener.  The first listening experience of a new listener can be critical to gaining that listener as a long time subscriber. For most music services, there’s a short user enrollment process that gets some basic info from the listener including their email address and some basic demographic information. Included in this information is the date of birth and the gender of the listener. Perhaps we can use basic demographic data to generate a slightly more refined set of artists.
In this post we give you some interesting results they got from these questions. Is there a difference between women and men, age or the city where people live?





Gender
Do men listen to different music than women do? Anecdotally, we can think of lots of examples that point to yes – it seems like more of One Direction’s fans are female, while more heavy metal fans are male, but lets take a look at some data to see if this is really the case.


Looking at the top 40 charts artists we see that more than a quarter of the artists are gender specific. Artists that top the female listener chart but are missing on the male listener chart include: Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato, Shakira, Britney Spears, One Direction, Christina Aguilera, Ke$ha, Ciara, Jennifer Lopez, Avril Lavigne and Nicki Minaj. Conversely, artists that top the male listener chart but are missing on the top 40 female listener chart include: Bob Marley, Kendrick Lamar, Wiz Khalifa, Avicii, T.I. Queen, J.Cole, Linkin Park, Kid Cudi and 50 Cent. While some artists seem to more easily cross gender lines like Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Lana Del Rey and Robin Thicke.
No matter what size chart we look at – whether it is the top 40, top 200 or the top 1000 artists – about 30% of artists on a gender-specific chart don’t appear on the corresponding chart for the opposite gender.  Similarly, about 15% of the artists that appear on a general chart of top artists will be of low relevance to a typical listener based on these gender-listening differences.

Does a 64-year-old listen to different music than a 13-year-old?

One would expect that people of different ages would have different music tastes. Let’s see if we can confirm this with our data.  For starters, lets compare the average listening habits of 64-year-old listeners to that of the aggregate listening habits of the 13-year-old listener. For this experiment I selected 5,000 listeners in each age category, and aggregated their normalized artist plays to find the most-frequently-played artists.  As expected, you can see that 64-year-old listeners have different tastes than 13-year-old listeners.



Now we take a look at how the location of a listener may affect their listening preferences.
For this study, they sampled the listening preferences of about a quarter million listeners that have a zip code associated with their account.  These listeners were aggregated into regions (state, regional and all-US). To compare regions they looked at the top-N most popular artists  based upon listener plays in each region and look for artists that have a substantial change in rank between the two regions. These artists are the artists that define the taste for the region.



Thanks for reading!
Love, Louise

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