Do they Discover Weekly your taste? The differences between heavy and light users of Spotify

The expansion of the streaming services and new media has led to overwhelming catalogues of content available online. One of the most popular music streaming platforms that offers a broad collection of music on demand is Spotify. To facilitate the music discovery, this service provides its users with algorithmically created Discover Weekly playlist, that allows exploring new content every Monday morning. Moreover, these algorithmically created recommendations have a significant potential to facilitate discovering of new music that users are not familiar with. However, recommendation systems are also perceived to decrease diversity as they keep users in filter bubbles and echo chambers, where they are exposed to similar content. How users of the service perceive the diversity of their music content may be dependent on characteristics as subscription model or the quantity of music consumed daily. As People that spend more time on exploring the Internet and new technologies are perceived to be heavy users. In contrary, when they are less active online, they can be categorized as the light users. This assumption was used concerning music listening through the streaming platform, Spotify. Therefore, this thesis aims to analyse whether the differences in Spotify usage have an impact on the perceptions of the algorithmically created playlist, Discover Weekly. Thus, the research question was asked: to what extent does the diversity of the music recommended by the Discover Weekly playlists differ between heavy and light users of Spotify? To answer the main research question six hypotheses regarding music diversity, algorithmic recommendations and algorithmic satisfaction were stated. To be able to measure the differences between heavy and light users, the quantitative surveys were conducted. With the use of gathered data from 359 Spotify users, the outcomes were examined with the use of statistical tests and the SPSS software. The analysis indicated that there are no significant differences between heavy and light users when considering self-reported use, thus all hypotheses were rejected. However, the examination of the results indicated differences regarding perceptions of being heavy or light users. The more people perceive themselves as heavy users, the more diverse they perceive their content to be, the more they appreciate algorithmic recommendations, and the more satisfied they are with Discover Weekly.