Music contests are a means of discovering talents and promoting musical abilities. Participation in a contest is usually preceded by many years of practice requiring a high level of motivation and a supportive environment, especially regarding family. Despite the importance participation in music contests may have for musical development, there is a considerable research deficit. The annual music contest "Jugend musiziert" (youth making music) is the most important musical competition for highly gifted young musicians in Germany. There has been comprehensive research on the participants of "Jugend musiziert" by Hans Günther Bastian in the 1980s and 1990s, but since then, only very little research has been published. In 2017, we started a large-scale study on the participants at the national level, covering a broad range of topics, including sociocultural background, development and learning, performance practice, personality traits, motivation, and musical performance anxiety. A standardized paper-pencil questionnaire was administered to approximately 2,260 participants and a total of 1,143 valid questionnaires was returned (age 9-24 years; M = 15; SD = 2.1, female = 62%). Using principal component, variance, correlation, and linear discriminant analyses, interdependencies between practice time and motivational factors were analyzed in this paper. Concerning practice time, major differences between participants of different contest categories became clear, with classical musicians practicing the most. Practice time, as well as parental support and supervision, correlated with age: Older participants spent, on average, more hours practicing and received less support and supervision. Challenge was the most important incentive for all participants, but more decisive for participants in the classical solo contest than in the ensemble category. Female participants were more prone to fear incentives than males. Participants who practiced a lot scored higher on general flow than the participants with a smaller amount of practice and also showed significantly more perseverance. Moreover, participants of the

Music streaming services (MSS) offer their users numerous ways of choosing and implementing their individual approaches to music listening. Personality, uses of music, and the acceptance of MSS can be conceptualized as interdependent. This study investigates whether negative affect modulation strategies explain differences in the acceptance of MSS and integrates findings from previous research into a structural equation model. As for measurements, the Big Five Inventory 2, the Inventory for the Assessment of Activation and Arousal modulation through Music, and adapted scales from previous research on the Technology Acceptance Model were used. A convenience sample of 825 participants (24.3 years; 74% females and 89% students) successfully completed an online questionnaire. In total, 89 percent of the sample reported using MSS regularly. The results show that the tendency to modulate negative affect through music is positively influenced by openness and neuroticism. In turn, the tendency to modulate negative affect through music is shown to increase the perceived usefulness of MSS. However, this study failed to replicate the previous findings that openness increases the attitude toward using and that neuroticism decreases the perceived usefulness. This implies that uses of music are more effective than personality traits at predicting the individual acceptance of MSS. However, personality can be viewed as a predictor for uses of music. The interwovenness of stable and situational factors of music choices is supported. MSS seem to assist their users in coping with negative affect in everyday life, increasing wellbeing. MSS should expand their personalization features to optimize user experience with respect to individual uses of music.