“Clouds & Concerts” music study results released

In October, Telenor announced its research partnership with the University of Oslo to understand how people discover, share and recommend music. As a part of this study, Telenor’s Beathe Due and her team of researchers visited Øya Festival in Oslo to learn more about how a live concert affects people’s practices on WiMP, a music streaming service.

Aptly coined “Clouds and Concerts”, this project made use of anonymous records of all music streamed during a nine-week period (before, during and after the Øya Festival). These records were analyzed in order to determine the “festival effect” on the music you choose.

“For Telenor Group and WiMP, this study gives us an increased understanding of digital user practices, which is both strategically important and helps us develop better services for the end-users,” explained Due. “As far as we know, there is no other study that analyzes people’s music listening patterns and the interplay of live music events with such a large amount of data. This is a truly unique way of doing real-time research in a digital environment that is rapidly changing.”

Let’s take a look at the results…

The average WiMP user played music by 92 different artists over nine weeks
Gone are the days when we were stuck within the confines of our own record collections or the whims of the local radio stations. WiMP users are showing their broad interests by taking advantage of the increased music sampling that streaming services enable.

Concerts drive streaming behaviour
Øya definitely made an impact on the streaming habits of WiMP users. During the week of the festival, the volume of streamed music from Øya artists doubled, as compared to the two weeks before and the two weeks after the festival. The marketing of the Øya artists also proved to be effective, as the official Øya playlist was played more than other playlists. Overall, the 81 Øya artists accounted for 15 percent of all music streamed on WiMP during the week of the festival.

Artist-oriented listening habits
Users prefer to stream several songs in a row by the same artist. The typical WiMP users spends a large portion of his/her time listening to a single artist. The artist preference also extends to search. When conducting a search, users typically search by artist name rather than song or album title.

Sharing music
Approximately a quarter of all WiMP users actively share their music or playlists on Facebook.

What’s next?

Beathe Due and her team plan to continue this project into 2011, going deeper into the relationship between old and new listening habits. Some of the areas they are going to look into are the effects of age on user practices and the role of social media in how music spreads.

“Through this project, we have learned that by collaborating with adjacent industry partners and academia, we create a win-win opportunity. We have also realized the definite need to know more about how people use, spread and recommend digital content. This is crucial insight for all digital players, not only the music industry, that will help them establish their roles in the competitive digital media landscape,” said Due.

Clouds and Concerts project members include: Anne Danielsen, University of Oslo Department of Musicology; Arnt Maasø, University of Oslo Department of Media and Communication; Hanne Tråsdahl, University of Oslo student; Erik N. Strutz, University of Oslo student; Kenth Engø-Monsen, Johannes Bjelland, Pål Roe Sundsøy and Beathe Due, Telenor Corporate Development.