Let Me Introduce You: Stimulating Taste-Broadening Serendipity Through Song Introductions
This addresses the challenge of increasing exploration and diversity in listening for users of music streaming platforms, though it is incremental as it builds on existing research about serendipity in recommendations.
The paper tackled the problem of music recommender systems struggling to spark user interest in songs outside their typical preferences by studying the efficacy of immersive and informative song introductions in stimulating Taste-Broadening Serendipity. The results showed that transportation (absorption into a narrative) was the strongest predictor of this effect, with cognitive elaboration (learning new context) having a weaker but more easily stimulated impact.
Research on how people experience music emphasizes the importance of exploration and diversity in listening. However, music recommender systems struggle with facilitating exploration. Even when music recommender systems are able to recommend something valuable to users that is outside their typical preferences, it still remains difficult to spark their interest. This paper presents a user study examining the efficacy of immersive and informative introductions in stimulating interest in songs that are beyond one's usual preferences, an experience called Taste-Broadening Serendipity. We uncover two important mechanisms behind the effect of introductions: transportation and cognitive elaboration. Our findings indicate that transportation (i.e., being absorbed into a narrative world) is the strongest predictor of Taste-Broadening Serendipity, while cognitive elaboration (i.e., learning something new about the artist or social context in which the music emerged) has a weaker effect but is easier to stimulate. We propose that song introductions can play an important role in facilitating exploration and increasing diversity of listening on music streaming platforms.