Analysis of the changes in listening trends of a music streaming service

People frequently change their music listening behaviors to fit their mood and particular situation. Such changes can be interpreted at various scales, e.g., the genres, artists, or specific tracks. Users of music streaming services expect to discover new music. However, discovering new music is not always a pleasant experience. Herein, we show that small changes in listening trends are good for users of such services. In contrast, large changes are bad. We modeled user listening trends using a hidden Markov model, which was applied hierarchically to analyze the user trends at multiple scales. We evaluated the changes in user listening trends to find good changes. Additionally, we analyzed the relationships between user listening trends and user lifestyle.