Tracing Affordance and Item Adoption on Music Streaming Platforms
This research addresses the problem of understanding heterogeneous user adoption decisions on streaming platforms for platform designers and researchers, though it is incremental in nature.
The study investigated user behavior on music streaming platforms by analyzing how different types of users adopt platform affordances and recommendations over a 2-year period, finding that behaviors are highly diverse with no universal adoption patterns.
Popular music streaming platforms offer users a diverse network of content exploration through a triad of affordances: organic, algorithmic and editorial access modes. Whilst offering great potential for discovery, such platform developments also pose the modern user with daily adoption decisions on two fronts: platform affordance adoption and the adoption of recommendations therein. Following a carefully constrained set of Deezer users over a 2-year observation period, our work explores factors driving user behaviour in the broad sense, by differentiating users on the basis of their temporal daily usage, adoption of the main platform affordances, and the ways in which they react to them, especially in terms of recommendation adoption. Diverging from a perspective common in studies on the effects of recommendation, we assume and confirm that users exhibit very diverse behaviours in using and adopting the platform affordances. The resulting complex and quite heterogeneous picture demonstrates that there is no blanket answer for adoption practices of both recommendation features and recommendations.