How Last.fm Illustrates the Musical World: User Behavior and Relevant User-Generated Content

Over the last few years, online multimedia exchange platforms have experienced a rapid growth. They allow users to share their own content and access other’s in turn and hence form very large public collections of User-Generated Content. While research is mostly looking at photo sharing platforms, such as Flickr, much less is known about online music communities. In this paper we present the results of an observational user study followed by a large-scale online survey, which investigated the behavior and the relevant content generated by the users of Last.fm, one of the most popular music communities. Based on the analysis of the results, we present implications for the usage of UserGenerated Content in online music communities. Then we developed a first prototype based on the implications for improving semantic understanding of collaborative tags. We believe our study gives insights for developing information visualization and recommender systems for online music communities. Author Keywords Online music community, User-Generated Content, user behavior, Last.fm.

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