Artist Preferences and Cultural, Socio-economic Distances Across Countries: A Big Data Perspective

Abstract

Users in different countries may have different music preferences, possibly due to geographical, economic, linguistic, and cultural factors. Revealing the relationship between music preference and cultural socio-economic differences across countries is of great importance for music information retrieval in a cross-country or cross-cultural context. Existing works are usually based on small samples in one or several countries or take only one or two socio-economic aspects into account. To bridge the gap, this study makes use of a large-scale music listening dataset, LFM-1b with more than one billion music listening logs, to explore possible associations between a variety of cultural and socio-economic measurements and artist preferences in 20 countries. From a big data perspective, the results reveal: 1) there is a highly uneven distribution of preferred artists across countries; 2) the linguistic differences among these countries are positively associated with the distances in artist preferences; 3) country differences in three of the six cultural dimensions considered in this study have positive influences on the difference of artist preferences among the countries; and 4) geographical and economic distances among the countries have no signifi- cant relationship with their artist preferences.