Proposed title and research outline
This proposal is outdated as of November 6th 2020.
Updated Title:
Analysing how music consumers can relate to the music they access using current streaming services as they would with personal music collections
An explanation for the choice of topic:
As digital devices are now readily accessible to the general population, there is a move away from material possession in terms of collection and access. There is an interest in accumulating collection digitally, however, it does not mean that they are curated or as relevant to the user as a personal collection.
As streaming services offer an almost permanent access to enormous libraries, there is a new relationship with the content. Previous research shows that collectors refer to, self-identify and create an emotional relationship with physical artefacts even if they are left unused. Could that still be the case with digital music?
Outline of research to be undertaken & how data will be analyzed
Gathering qualitative data*
- Group observation and discussion session
- Semi-structured interviews
Both the interviews and the group observation would be conducted online. Guidelines and a consent form will be provided beforehand.
Quantitative data*
- Questionnaire
The questionnaire would be directed to a pool of subjects over 18.
The qualitative data gathered will be useful in analysing the experience and impressions of the music consumers across age groups and professional backgrounds. By holding a group discussion, I hope to obtain insights regarding the perception of music consumers for current streaming services and the collecting, curating, sharing habits enabled by today's technology versus older media types (physical CD/vinyl collections, etc.).
The data gathered during the research will remain absolutely confidential and anonymous. The majority of the data will be qualitative, however, quantitative data gathered using a questionnaire either prior or after the group discussion will help clarify assumption and consolidate findings.
I propose to find which streaming service among the top three (Spotify, Youtube Music, Deezer) is preferred and from there, identify why. Lastly, I want to distinguish collection patterns and access patterns to the music -- is one streaming service more relevant in a certain situation? Does it affect the social presentation of the individuals? Moreover, I want to see what distinguishes the use of a streaming service over the purchase of a digital album or song from the online marketplaces such as Amazon Music or Itunes. Is there a storage issue, as streaming offers a more ephemeral data usage?
Journal and research so far (WIP): https://vero-hsa-journal.netlify.app/blog/
Preliminary Bibliography
Kumar, N., & Parikh, T. S. (2013). Mobiles, Music, and Materiality. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2863–2872. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2481396
Toups, Z. O., Crenshaw, N. K., Wehbe, R. R., Tondello, G. F., & Nacke, L. E. (2016). “The collecting itself feels good”: Towards collection interfaces for digital game objects. CHI PLAY 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, 276–290. https://doi.org/10.1145/2967934.2968088
Wolff, A., & Mulholland, P. (2013). Curation, Curation, Curation. http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/
Vlachos, P., & Vrechopoulos, A. (2004). Emerging Customer Trends Towards Mobile Music Services. www.mad.gr
Cheng, Z., Shen, J., Nie, L., Chua, T. S., & Kankanhalli, M. (2017). Exploring user-specific information in music retrieval. SIGIR 2017 - Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 655–664. https://doi.org/10.1145/3077136.3080772
Magaudda, P. (2011). When materiality “bites back”: Digital music consumption practices in the age of dematerialization. Journal of Consumer Culture, 11(1), 15–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540510390499
