Understanding users of cloud music services: Selection factors, management and access behavior, and perceptions

Abstract

Recent, rapid changes in technology have resulted in a proliferation of choices for music storage and access. Portable, web‐enabled music devices are widespread, and listeners now enjoy a plethora of options regarding formats, devices, and access methods. Yet in this mobile music environment, listeners' access and management strategies for music collections are poorly understood, because behaviors surrounding the organization and retrieval of music collections have received little formal study. Our current research seeks to enrich our knowledge of people's music listening and collecting behavior through a series of systematic user studies. In this paper we present our findings from interviews involving 20 adult and 20 teen users of commercial cloud music services. Our results contribute to theoretical understandings of users' music information behavior in a time of upheaval in music usage patterns, and more generally, the purposes and meanings users ascribe to personal media collections in cloud‐based systems. The findings suggest improvements to the future design of cloud‐based music services, as well as to any information systems and services designed for personal media collections, benefiting both commercial entities and listeners.

Affordances for information practices: theorizing engagement among people, technology, and sociocultural environments

“…The first example is music exploration and discovery activity, which is one of the most important information practices in cloud music services (Lee et al , 2017). As shown in Figure 3, the subject of these information activities is music listeners; the object is music and music-related information (e.g.…”

Music information seeking behaviour among the students of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Osijek

“…Lee, Cho and Kim (2016) found that 82.2% of the respondents searched for music they heard on streaming services, while 21.1% of the respondents used music-related apps (such as Pandora or Spotify) almost every day (13.2%), or a few times per week (7.9%). Lee et al (2017), in their interviews (of 20 adults and 20 teen users), investigated music information behaviour in cloud-based systems and revealed that the most popular cloud services among respondents were Google Play Music, Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud, Google Drive and Dropbox, which they mostly used for listening to their collections. Furthermore, participants also used streaming sites such as Spotify, Pandora and YouTube for discovering and listening to music for different purposes.…”

Music-search behaviour on a social Q&A site: A cross-gender comparison

“…As for music tasks, perceived task difficulty in music research is affected by task complexity, user background, system affordances, task uncertainty and enjoyability in the study of Hu et al [24]. There is growing consensus that user-based analysis and information behavioural researches are key to promoting the design of MIR systems [25]. For example, Lee and Price [26] explored how users interacted with MIR system and evaluated their experience with the music services.…”