Social streaming? Navigating music as personal and social

Abstract

Music-streaming services embed social features that enable users to connect to one another and use music as social objects. This paper examines how these features are experienced within negotiations of music as personal and social through the acts of sharing music and of following others. The analysis relies on 23 focus-group interviews with 124 Spotify or/and Tidal users, and a mixed-method study including music-diary self-reports, online observation, and interviews with 12 heavy users. Our findings suggest that users incorporate social awareness in non-sharing, selective-sharing, and all-sharing approaches with strong, weak, and absent ties. These ties are characterized by different configurations of social and music homophily. Negotiations of music as personal and social shape how music-streaming services are experienced