Artist Preferences and Cultural, Socio-Economic Distances Across Countries: A Big Data Perspective

Users in different countries may have different music preferences, possibly due to geographical, economic, linguistic, and cultural factors. Revealing the relationship between music preference and cultural socio-economic differences across countries is of great importance for music information retrieval in a cross-country or cross-cultural context. Existing works are usually based on small samples in one or several countries or take only one or two socio-economic aspects into account. To bridge the gap, this study makes use of a large-scale music listening dataset, LFM-1b with more than one billion music listening logs, to explore possible associations between a variety of cultural and socio-economic measurements and artist preferences in 20 countries. From a big data perspective, the results reveal: 1) there is a highly uneven distribution of preferred artists across countries; 2) the linguistic differences among these countries are positively associated with the distances in artist preferences; 3) country differences in three of the six cultural dimensions considered in this study have positive influences on the difference of artist preferences among the countries; and 4) geographical and economic distances among the countries have no significant relationship with their artist preferences.