Demographic analysis of music preferences in streaming service networks

Abstract

As Daniel J. Levitin noted, music is a cross-cultural phenomenon, a ubiquitous activity found in every known human culture. It is indeed, a living matter that flows through cultures, which makes it a complex system potentially holding valuable information. Therefore, we model country-to-country interactions to reveal macro-level music trends. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we explore the way specific demographic characteristics, such as language and geographic location affect the global community structure in streaming service networks. Secondly, we examine whether a clear flow of musical trends exists in the world by identifying countries who are prominent leaders on the music streaming charts. The community analysis shows that there is strong support for the first claim. Next, we find that the flow of musical trends is not strongly directional globally, although we were still able to identify prominent leaders and followers within the communities. The obtained results can further lead to the development of more sophisticated music recommendation systems, kindle new cultural studies and bring discoveries in the field of musicology.