Understanding Playlist Creation on Music Streaming Platforms

Music streaming platforms enable people to access millions of tracks using computers and mobile devices. The latter allow users consume different music during different activities. Both, the sheer amount of music and the mobile access to music makes music organization an interesting topic for multimedia researchers. Assisting users to organize their music and make the music they like easily available in the right moment, contributes to increased usability of music streaming platforms. To get a deeper understanding of how users organize music nowadays, we analyze user-created playlists crawled from the music streaming platform Spotify. Using this new data set we find an explanation of differences in the playlists using audio features and based on this compute playlist clusters. We find that 91% of all users create at least one playlist in the “feel good music”-cluster and classical music or rap music can be considered as niche music with respect to the number of playlists, however not as niche music when considering the number of users. To foster research in this field, we make our analysis tool publicly available.

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