Abstract:
Researchers and service providers have focused on leveraging social information acquired from interactions between users to improve the accuracy of system recommendations. However, few have explained the characteristics of music recommendations through interpersonal relationships. To investigate how interpersonal relationships affect users’ evaluation of music recommendation, we conducted a survey-based study that compared two types of recommendation channels—interpersonal (i.e., from friends) and non-interpersonal (i.e., from systems). We found that relevance was evaluated higher in music recommended from non-interpersonal channels on average, while diversity, novelty, and serendipity were higher in interpersonal channels. Non-interpersonal channels surpassed interpersonal channels in terms of convenience, frequency, and adoption rate. These results illustrate that interpersonal and non-interpersonal channels have different strengths and that digital streaming platforms, which have mainly provided system recommendations thus far, need to better support interpersonal channels for richer user experience.
