Understanding Users of Cloud Music Services: Selection Factors, Management and Access Behavior, and Perceptions

Recent, rapid changes in technology have resulted in a proliferation of choices for music storage and access. Portable, web-enabled music devices are widespread, and listeners now enjoy a plethora of options regarding formats, devices, and access methods. Yet in this mobile music environment, listeners' access and management strategies for music collections are poorly understood, because behaviors surrounding the organization and retrieval of music collections have received little formal study. Our current research seeks to enrich our knowledge of people's music listening and collecting behavior through a series of systematic user studies. In this paper we present our findings from interviews involving 20 adult and 20 teen users of commercial cloud music services. Our results contribute to theoretical understandings of users' music information behavior in a time of upheaval in music usage patterns, and more generally, the purposes and meanings users ascribe to personal media collections in cloud-based systems. The findings suggest improvements to the future design of cloud-based music services, as well as to any information systems and services designed for personal media collections, benefiting both commercial entities and listeners.