Discovery And User Engagement In Music Platforms: An Experimental Investigation

Music streaming platforms facilitate the interactions between consumers and artists, and they connect the two sides of the market. The platform markets literature suggests that the success of platforms depends on the volume of consumers' usage and level of engagement. To this end, music streaming platforms take actions to promote music discovery with the view that consumers' music discovery activities lead to higher usage and engagement. In this research-in-progress paper, we investigate how informational signals (e.g. popularity and peer ratings) impact users' music discovery processes. We build on insights from the information search, peer influence, and decision-making literatures to examine the underlying mechanisms of the music discovery process. We hypothesize that informational signals, both in content and variance attributes, would increase a user's music consumption and engagement with a music platform. We enumerate an experiment design to test our hypotheses.