Baby Shark to Barracuda: Analyzing Children’s Music Listening Behavior

Lawrence Spear, Ashlee Milton, Garrett Allen, Amifa Raj, Michael Green, Michael D. Ekstrand, and Maria Soledad Pera. 2021. “Baby Shark to Barracuda: Analyzing Children’s Music Listening Behavior”. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2021 Late-Breaking Results).

Abstract

Music is an important part of childhood development, with online music listening platforms being a significant channel by which children can consume music. Children’s offline music listening behavior has been heavily researched, yet relatively few studies explore how their behavior manifests online. Existing studies investigate how artist genre preference varies among children in different age ranges; distinctions between individual ages remain unexplored. In this paper, we use data from LastFM 1 Billion and the Spotify API to explore the online music listening behavior of children, ages 6–17, using education levels as lenses for our analysis. Understanding the music listening behavior of children can be used to inform the future design of recommender systems.

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