Mindful Music Listening

Abstract

Recommender systems have become a core strategy of countless online sites and platforms including music streaming services like Spotify. These recommender systems are associated with limiting our exposure to a narrower range of content, this is even the case for features designed to promote discovery like Spotify’s Discover Weekly. Discover Weekly is curated with the aim to match users’ current preferences, it analyses its users’ listening habits and searches for similar songs that they haven’t heard before. While presenting users with new songs, Discover Weekly keeps users from discovering new and diverse music. This project aimed to design an intervention that increases user’s exposure to diverse music and fosters wellbeing.

For this, literature research was conducted. First an understanding of the current landscape of features of music streaming service was created. This led to the conclusion that personalised recommendations were the most relevant for this project, as they are driven by recommender systems. Next, different personalised recommendation features were linked to wellbeing. It was established that mood-based recommendations have the potential to contribute to hedonism, that activity-based recommendations have the potential to contribute to personal functioning and that discovery recommendations have the potential to contribute to personal development.

Given the alignment with the broader concerns of recommender systems, the project continued to focus on discovery features and personal development.
By analysing how current recommender systems operate in these feature, it was determined how that the recommender system of the new intervention should implement an ‘exploration mode’ approach and gradually introduce users to new items, allowing them to slowly acclimate to new genres over time.
Next, the design focus was narrowed down to: promoting personal development through expanding user’s musical horizons by introducing them to diverse music that differs from their current listening behaviour, fostering greater understanding of others and oneself. This design focus let to two different concepts. The first concept is ‘Discover More’, which adopts a similar approach as Discover Weekly, an automatically created playlist that gradually introduces users with new genres. The other concept is ‘Explore More’, a concept in which users are encouraged to actively explore new genres themselves. After evaluation it was decided to continue with Explore More. This concept was further developed and after evaluation of this concept, an improved version of the concept is proposed for the next cycle.

The concept highlights the gap between the vast musical landscape and the music the user listens to, creating awareness of their musical bubble and inspiring them to start exploring new music genres. Additionally, Explore More helps users gain deeper awareness and understanding of their own preferences. This is achieved with the help a guided self-reflection. Furthermore, the feedback on the reflection is utilized by the AI in selecting next genres and aims to align with the mood and taste of the user. After several exploration journeys, Explore More provides a recap—an opportunity to revisit the musical discoveries and providing insights into remarkable trends, such as specific elements that repeatedly spoke to the user, contributing to self-awareness.

Lastly, the report ends with additional suggestions that could be taken into consideration during the next cycle.