Abstract
Music listening is an inherently cultural behavior, which may be shaped by users’ backgrounds and contextual characteristics. Due to geographical, socio-economic, linguistic, and cultural factors as well as friendship networks, users in different countries may have different music preferences. Investigating cultural-socio-economic factors that might be associated with between-country differences in music preferences can facilitate music information retrieval, contribute to the prediction of users’ music preferences, and improve music recommendation in cross-country contexts. However, previous literature provides limited empirical evidence of the relationships between possible cross-country differences on a wide range of socio-economic aspects and those in music preferences. To bridge this research gap, and drawing on a large-scale dataset, LFM-1b, this study examines the possible relationship between cross-country differences in artist, album, and genre listening frequencies as well as the cross-country distance in geographical, socio-economic, linguistic, cultural, and friendship connections using the Quadratic Assignment Procedure. Results indicate: (1) there is no significant relationship between geographical and economic distance on album, artist, and genre preferences’ distance at the country-level; (2) the cross-country distance of three cultural dimensions (masculinity, long-term orientation, and indulgence) is positively associated with both the album and artist preferences distances; (3) the between-country distance in main languages has a positive relationship with the album, artist, and genre preferences distances across countries; (4) the density of friendship connections among countries negatively correlates to the cross-country preference distances in terms of artist and genre. Findings from this study not only expand knowledge of factors related to music preferences at the country level, but also can be integrated into real-world music recommendation systems that consider country-level music preferences.
Highlights
We apply the Quadratic Assignment Procedure (QAP) [102, 103] via Double Dekker Semi-partialling [104] to examine whether the between-country differences in album, artist and genre preferences are associated with the differences in geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic proximities, and friendship connections between countries
Revealing the relationship between the difference among countries in music preference and in the aforementioned context categories is of vital importance to answer which cultural-socio-economic factors should be integrated into music retrieval and recommender systems, for instance, to provide a better personalization of results
Built on a theoretical framework developed from classic theories in cultural and social studies, and using Quadratic Assignment Procedure techniques, this study uncovered various between-country differences in cultural-socio-economic aspects and in album, artist, and genre listening preferences (RQ1), as well as in the relationship between these differences (RQ2)
Summary
With the popularity of music available online through worldwide streaming services, growing importance has been attached to exploring cross-country similarities and differences in music. Studies investigated the relationship between sociocultural-economic factors, e.g., social connections [18], cultural traditions [19], social class [20], educational level [20] and languages [21], and individuals’ music preferences These studies suffered limitations due to small sample sizes and self-reported data. In some recent cross-country studies, the relationship between one or two aspects of socio-cultural-economic factors (e.g., the economic aspect [22], the cultural aspects [23], and friendship connections [24]) and music listening has been explored, many important factors have not been included in the models, which may lead to unreliable results [25, 26] This is because missing relevant variables in statistical models may bring omitted variable bias. The paper is rounded off by a conclusion that indicates the limitations of the study (Section 7) and an outlook to future work
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