Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
During the last decade, the music business faced a tremendous change
from sales of physical CDs to digital music downloads and subscription-
based streaming services. When Napster was introduced in 1999, sales of
physical albums started to decrease rapidly. Sales of digital music have
now bypassed those of physical media and become a dominant revenue
source in many countries, including the US, the world's largest music
market. At the end of 2011, there were over 500 legitimate music services
available globally, with music catalogues encompassing up to 20 million
tracks (IPFI 2012).
Music subscription services such as Spotify (Spotify 2012) and Deezer
(Deezer 2012) are now transforming the way people experience and pay
for music, and the business model is expanding fast (IPFI 2012). By
paying a monthly fee, users are able to stream unlimited amounts of music
to various personal devices, and consume it on demand. Spotify recently
announced that it had over 20 million regular users, over 5 million paid
subscribers worldwide, and over 1 billion playlists created by service
users, with the number of playlists and paying customers doubling in a
year (Evolver.FM 2012).
While the size of online music catalogues is increasing rapidly and the
content is now more easily accessible, there is also an increasing need to
investigate new ways to find personally relevant music and to make music
listening and searching a pleasurable experience. As a result, the focus of
research is shifting towards inventing new service concepts and improving
the user experience of current services. To differentiate from their
competitors, music service developers should aim to design novel,
entertaining, and easy-to-use user interfaces (UIs,) and interaction methods
for accessing their catalogues.
One promising approach is to replace or complement traditional textual
lists (artist, song, or genre names) with interactive visualizations. In the
case of these “casual” information visualizations, selected visual attributes
are mapped to the musical metadata of the music catalogue. By clicking on
the desired part(s) of the visualization, the user can quickly explore the
music catalogue, receive new recommendations, or generate radio channels
playing music that matches their preferences “well enough.” Alternatively,
visualizations can simply be used to show additional music-related
information on the screen in an entertaining and aesthetic way (Holm
2012).
A well-designed visualization can improve the usability and efficiency
of the system (Hoashi et al. 2009). By relying on clear associations
between visual and musical attributes, the user's cognitive load can be
reduced; thus, users do not need to be musical experts to access the music
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