Abstract
Today, collaborative playlists (CPs) translate long-standing social practices around music consumption to enable people to curate and listen to music together over streaming platforms. Yet despite the critical role of CPs in digitally connecting people through music, we still understand very little about the needs and desires of real-world users, and how CPs might be designed to best serve them. To bridge this gap in knowledge, we conducted a survey with CP users, collecting open-ended text responses on what aspects of CPs they consider most important and useful, and what they viewed as missing or desired. Using thematic analysis, we derived from these responses the Codebook of Critical CP Factors, which comprises eight categories. We gained insights into which aspects of CPs are particularly useful—for instance, the ability for multiple collaborators to edit a single playlist—and which are absent and desired—such as the ability for collaborators to communicate about a CP or the music contained therein. From these findings we propose design implications to inform further design of CP functionalities and platforms, and highlight potential benefits and challenges related to their adoption in current music services.
Highlights
Selecting and listening to music together are long-standing social activities
As our main research question, we ask, What aspects of collaborative playlist (CP) and their experience are most important to users?. We address this question by unpacking free-text responses from N = 70 real-world CP users, all of whom were found to have engaged with CPs using Spotify
Our thematic analysis yielded the Codebook of Critical CP Factors, which consists of eight high-level categories
Summary
Selecting and listening to music together are long-standing social activities. One such activity is music co-curation, which has a rich history spanning multiple use cases over the past century, from technologies and artifacts predating digital music collections (e.g., jukeboxes, mixtapes) to today’s usage of music streaming platforms. Among various methods through which users can curate music together on streaming platforms is co-editing of a collaborative playlist (CP), which is “a list of songs that multiple users have created using a digital platform” [1]. CP functionalities have been available on major commercial streaming platforms for over a decade, enabling users to socially curate and consume music in a manner similar to personal music curation.
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