Effects of recommendations on the playlist creation behavior of users

The digitization of music, the emergence of online streaming platforms and mobile apps have dramatically changed the ways we consume music. Today, much of the music that we listen to is organized in some form of a playlist, and many users of modern music platforms create playlists for themselves or to share them with others. The manual creation of such playlists can however be demanding, in particular due to the huge amount of possible tracks that are available online. To help users in this task, music platforms like Spotify provide users with interactive tools for playlist creation. These tools usually recommend additional songs to include given a playlist title or some initial tracks. Interestingly, little is known so far about the effects of providing such a recommendation functionality. We therefore conducted a user study involving 270 subjects, where one half of the participants—the treatment group—were provided with automated recommendations when performing a playlist construction task. We then analyzed to what extent such recommendations are adopted by users and how they influence their choices. Our results, among other aspects, show that about two thirds of the treatment group made active use of the recommendations. Further analyses provide additional insights about the underlying reasons why users selected certain recommendations. Finally, our study also reveals that the mere presence of the recommendations impacts the choices of the participants, even in cases when none of the recommendations was actually chosen.