Day 1 (The Setup)

The first day of this experiment was quite interesting. When setting up the new account, the app used some methods of data collection to gain an initial understanding of the music I would like to listen to. 

Asking for my:

  • Date of Birth,
  • Preferred Gender, 
  • and artists that I may be interested in
To ensure the experiment was fare I chosen artists from three different genres this being:
  • Taylor Swift (POP)
  • Fred Again (DNB)
  • Travis Scott (RAP)

When first landing on the Homepage I was presented with different playlists each seemingly related to the artists I had chosen. Three playlists in particular (featured in the 'To get you started subheading') each presented content that featured artists closely related to ones I had chosen and were all drastically different genres wise. 

Another subheading labelled 'Try something new' featured playlists that sprinkled in popular songs from genres that I had not chosen. Which to Spotify's credit, did introduce me to some new artists. The problem was, that the songs being recommended to me were songs I was already knowledgeable about. It was cool to see genres such as RnB and Rock being recommended to me. However, it being any song by the Weekend or 'The Brightside' by The Killers didn't set me up for high hopes. This does show however, that the RA does seem to diversify the content it present to new users. Meaning that over time content recommended to me may become more diverse and uncontemporary.

For now, I believe that the app is going to recommend me mostly contemporary music. As the artists in these 'try something new' playlists were already well established in their respected genres and the songs it was recommending me were their most popular songs. There wasn't much variety in the types of content it was recommending to me.

Overall, it does seem as if the RA is coded to recommend me different artists, but it seems to only present the most popular songs from the most popular artists featured on the app. A reason for this, may be due to the fact that the app doesn't have much historical data about my listening habits as of yet. Hence, the further we get through this study, the more variety and diversity we will see in the music. 

Things that could be looked into in future studies and research:

  • Why am I being pushed to only listen to popular music?
  • Does this correlate with the music industry and the control labels have on these streaming services? 
  • Does Social media relate to this?

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