Hello my name is So Yeon Park and I'll be presenting our paper "Hitting Pause: How User
Perceptions of Collaborative Playlists Evolved in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was written in collaboration with my colleagues Emily Redmond, Jonathan Berger,
and Blair Kaneshiro. The novel coronavirus disease has had a profound effect around the world
as well as those in the United States, and people have suffered pandemic-related social impacts
including depression, anxiety, and loneliness, to name a few. People have relied on various
computer-mediated interactions to cope with these issues of social isolation and loneliness.
People have also turned to music to cope with the consequences of the pandemic.
Yet a study of music streaming platforms has found that it is only user-user social features
that enable people to feel connectedness and one such user-user social feature is the collaborative
playlist. This is essentially a list of songs that multiple users have created and modified
using a digital platform such as Spotify, which is what you're looking at here. Prior HCI work
on these collaborative playlists found that they facilitated sharing and connectedness
even before COVID-19. Given that they are a way for people to stay connected through
music in socially distant times, we wanted to understand: How have perceptions and experiences
changed around collaborative playlists due to the COVID-19 pandemic? To answer this guiding research
question, we conducted a mixed-method study that consisted of an online survey and a follow-up
interview study. We benchmarked our online survey on a prior study that was conducted in 2019.
This asked questions including perceived outcomes of using collaborative playlists
and how music helped people to connect, among others. In our survey we also included questions
of whether collaborative playlist interest and involvement increased or decreased and the extent
of impact that these participants perceived of the pandemic on their in-person activities.
We recruited participants using the same recruitment methods as done in prior work
and garnered 142 responses of which 94% were from collaborative playlist users. Through
survey results, we found that for the majority of our participants interest and involvement in
the collaborative playlist increased. We compared collaborative playlist users' perceptions of the
outcomes from using these playlists by asking the same questions from the 2019 study asking their
agreement to various statements starting with "Collaborative playlists have..." We found that 5
out of 9 statements that we compared were shown to be significantly greater for the current sample,
of which one was that the "Collaborative playlist have made listening to music more enjoyable."
Notably we also found the participants in our current study had greater agreement with the
statements "Collaborative playlists have made me more open to new experiences in general"
and "... made me appreciate music platforms with collaborative playlists more."
We also inquired how participants' perceived extent of in-person activities were affected
by the pandemic. And in looking at their agreement to the statements of outcomes with respect to this
pandemic impact, we found that participants agreement to "Collaborative playlists have
positively influenced my music taste" was greater the more they felt impacted by the pandemic.
We also found that participants' agreement to the statements relating to music helping to
connect with others was greater the more they felt impacted by the pandemic both in general as well
as personally. After completing our online survey study, we followed up with an interview study.
We recruited those who had already completed the survey and conducted semi-structured interviews
to capture nuances. We asked in particular how their feelings around collaborative playlists
changed with the pandemic as well as their usage around them. We also asked about the role that
these collaborative playlists played during the pandemic. We interviewed nine participants
of which eight were collaborative playlist users, and we found that usage patterns changed in really
diverse ways. For some, such as P9, they weren't inclined to interact with the collaborative
playlist as they associated these playlists with more celebratory music which usually started from
in-person conversations. For others, collaborative playlist engagement became more intense and even
became a regular part of their lives. Collaborator groups also changed: Bigger collaborations
were replaced by smaller ones that enabled people to make more meaningful connections.
The content within these collaborative playlists also changed. Rather than being
curated for social events, the collaborative playlist during the pandemic consisted more
of the actual music they were listening to at the time. Ultimately, collaborative playlists
facilitated social connections and this was a sentiment echoed by most of our interviewees.
Prior to the pandemic, P4 initially did not desire to participate in collaborative playlists because
they thought these playlists would take away from the music that they actually wanted to listen to.
However, they quickly realized the benefits of them, and it also helped them to foster a sense
of connection with their friends. Similarly P1 also felt that the collaborative playlist
played a role in keeping up with others and expressed that his experience through COVID
would have been very different without them. A common thread in our survey and interview results
is that the collaborative playlists have been primarily used for social connection during
the pandemic. Moreover while past collaborative playlist research reported a correlation between
collaborative playlist usage and social connection, our results from the study
show that this connection is causal. Given users' desire for social connection and the efficacy of
achieving this through collaborative playlists, our first design implication is that platforms
should include more social functionalities to amplify this role of connecting with others.
This can be addressed by incorporating best practices from collaborative HCI systems
such as embedding communication channels, integrating notifications to encourage
more interaction within the playlist, and even incorporating analytics regarding collaborators.
And while the collaborative playlist was largely seen as a tool for greater social connection,
some participants stated that sharing music by sending links could feel more personal
than doing so via the collaborative playlist. This forms our second design implication that
collaborative playlist platforms should enable users to include more of their personal touches,
and this could take the form of particular kinds of cover art or even adding transitions between
songs. Despite the social connecting role that the collaborative playlist has,
prior work has shown that non-users were less aware of these social benefits,
and they instead highlighted music discovery and other cognitive purposes for engaging
in the collaborative playlist, and so did a non-user survey participant in our study. This,
along with the discomfort of sharing songs, further leads to creating a high entry barrier for
collaborative playlists that platforms can help to lower through more accessible designs. Platforms
should better support new users seeking social connection during COVID-19 and future possible
pandemics. This could include connecting users with friends or others with similar music tastes,
providing private spaces in the interface to promote psychological safety, and even suggesting
songs for a user to add to the collaborative playlist with some context. Our work shows
that the pandemic has increased the importance of the collaborative playlist as an effective
instrument that mediates music as a social good. Our participants responses suggest that music
engagement with a social angle can beget more meaningful music experiences. Thank you very much.