Listen or interact? A Large-scale survey on music listening and management behaviours

The results of an online survey on music listening and management are presented and analyzed. With 590 participants, the main goal was to understand how much control the respondents desired on their music listening experience and how much interaction with their music source they would be willing to have in order to exert such control. A need for interaction techniques which take minimal effort and let users steer the listening experience by controlling key attributes of songs was observed. The time required for this interaction should be similar to how long it takes to skip one song. Examples of attributes that needed to be controlled were found to be mood, familiarity, tempo, and how distracting the songs are. Some other notable findings were that our participants had a median of 4600 songs in their music collections, that portable devices are the most popular music source, that commuting and work are the top activities accompanying music, and that online music services have not gained much traction with users.