In recent times, music has become a soul and a natural healer. Music-recommended systems like Spotify and others have been integral in delivering extensive music collections to their listeners. However, while these music-recommended system has become a part of the music delivery system, nonmainstream music listeners often demand other sources to listen to no-so-popular music. Much research has been conducted, and papers have been written to understand the characteristics of beyond-mainstream music listeners. Many studies reveal that these nonmainstream listeners’ demographic characteristics, recommendations, and quality of music listened to were drastically affected. The quality of music they listened to showed some significant differences between them.
Introduction
As mentioned above, the music-recommended systems drastically impact one’s mind and can change their mood when necessary. They also help in searching, filtering, and sorting from music collections. In addition to building their characteristics, they significantly impact the artists’ income and hold a considerable leverage in their music-recommended approaches. This means the current music listening systems must be able to help the mainstream and nonmainstream listeners segregate and filter the popular and nonmainstream music from the site.
This means the recommended music systems in today’s world do not work well for listeners who are interested in nonmainstream music. This helps in building distinguished characters, which also applies to movies. However, studies have also proved that nonmainstream music listeners have a higher number of varied and distinctive artists when compared to their mainstream counterparts. This has posed a severe challenge to understanding nonmainstream music and music listeners.
The study conducted on the characteristic of beyond-mainstream music listens proved to have diverse characteristics. Some of the gears of beyond-mainstream music include:
- Folk
- Hardrock
- Ambient music with a higher percentage of instruments
- Instruments of music like electronica and so on
These music genres have a higher diversity, are more open to receiving suggestions and recommendations from other groups of music liners, and tend to gel well among different groups.
Contributions to defining characteristics
The contribution from the study is as follows:
- Beyond-mainstream music listens have a love-hate relationship with music, and they have a lower recommendation list when compared to their counterparts.
- Over 2000 beyond-mainstream listeners have enriched profiles on different music sites and applications.
- They have a distinguished openness and possess a higher-quality group.
- They possess greater diversity.
- These sites often filter their playlist based on unsupervised clustering and filtering based on their characteristics.
Some of the factors that help in understanding the characteristics of beyond-mainstream music listeners are:
- Long tail recommendations from different applications
- Curbed popularity bias in most of the recommended music systems like Spotify
- Systematic modeling of different music preferences