Listen or interact? A Large-scale survey on music listening and management behaviours

The results of an online survey on music listening and management are presented and analysed. With 590 participants, we especially focused on understanding how precise of a control the respondents desired on their music listening, how much interaction with their music source they were willing to have to exert such control, and how these preferences were affected by the type of activity accompanying music listening. A need was observed for novel interfaces that require minimal effort and let users steer the listening experience by controlling key attributes of songs, within the confines of a mobile device. Examples of such attributes were found to be mood, genre, tempo, familiarity, and how distracting the songs are. Along with type of accompanying activity, factors such as age, gender, size of collection, and music listening hours were found to influence the listeners' control and interaction preferences. Some other notable findings were that our participants had a median of 4650 songs in their music collections, that portable devices were their most popular music source, and that commuting and work were the top activities accompanying music.