[Paper Review] Disrupted Routines Anticipate Musical Exploration

Khwan Kim, Noah Askin+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jan 9, 2023

Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and IdentificationBusiness, Management and Accounting3 citations

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 100 million music streams from global users and finds that disruptions to personal routines—such as traveling to new countries or experiencing COVID-19 lockdowns and reopenings—systematically trigger increased musical exploration. The key result is that routine disruptions precede and anticipate diversification of music preferences, suggesting music exploration serves as a psychological adaptation to change.

ABSTRACT

Prior research suggests that taste preferences relate to personality traits, values, shifts in mood, and immigration destination, but understanding everyday patterns of listening and the function music plays in life have remained elusive, despite speculations that musical nostalgia may compensate for local disruption. Using more than a hundred million streams of 4 million songs by tens of thousands of international listeners from a global music service catering to local tastes, here we show that breaches in personal routine are systematically associated with personal musical exploration. As people visited new cities and countries, their preferences diversified, converging towards their destinations. As people experienced COVID-19 lock-downs, and then again when they experienced reopenings, their preferences diversified further.

Motivation & Objective

• To understand how everyday changes in routine influence individual music listening behavior and preference diversity.
• To investigate whether disruptions such as migration or pandemic-related restrictions anticipate shifts in musical taste.
• To test the hypothesis that music exploration functions as a psychological adaptation to environmental change.
• To examine whether music preferences converge toward local tastes in new destinations, indicating cultural integration through music.
• To analyze the temporal dynamics of musical exploration before, during, and after major life disruptions.

Proposed method

• The study uses a large-scale dataset of over 100 million music streams from 4 million songs across tens of thousands of international users on a global music streaming service.
• Routine disruptions are operationalized through user location changes (e.g., visiting new cities or countries) and temporal markers such as the onset and end of COVID-19 lockdowns and reopenings.
• Musical exploration is quantified by measuring the diversity of music preferences before and after routine disruptions using entropy-based metrics on listening histories.
• The analysis compares changes in preference diversity across different disruption types (e.g., travel vs. pandemic) and assesses convergence of preferences toward destination-specific music trends.
• The researchers use time-series analysis to examine the temporal sequence of routine disruption and subsequent changes in music exploration, establishing anticipation effects.
• Statistical models control for individual differences in baseline listening behavior and test for systematic shifts in preference diversity following disruptions.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 Do disruptions to personal routines anticipate increases in musical exploration across diverse populations?
• RQ2 How does musical preference diversity change in response to international travel and migration?
• RQ3 To what extent do individuals' music preferences converge toward local tastes after arriving in new countries?
• RQ4 How did music exploration patterns shift during and after COVID-19 lockdowns and reopenings?
• RQ5 Is there a consistent temporal pattern where routine disruption precedes, rather than follows, changes in music taste?

Key findings

• Routine disruptions such as visiting new countries are systematically followed by increased diversity in music preferences, indicating anticipatory musical exploration.
• After arriving in new countries, users' music preferences converge toward local musical trends, suggesting cultural integration through music.
• During COVID-19 lockdowns, users showed a significant increase in musical exploration, with preference diversity rising before the onset of restrictions.
• Reopenings after lockdowns triggered another surge in musical exploration, indicating that the anticipation of returning to normal routines also drives listening diversity.
• The temporal sequence shows that routine disruptions precede changes in music taste, supporting the hypothesis that music exploration anticipates environmental change.
• The effect is robust across diverse populations and is not explained by individual personality traits or mood shifts alone, highlighting the role of structural disruption in shaping listening behavior.