Toward an Understanding of Musical Factors in Judging a Song on First Listen

When a user listens to a song for the first time, what musical factors (e.g., melody, tempo, and lyrics) influence the user’s decision to like or dislike the song? An answer to this question would enable researchers to more deeply understand how people interact with music. Thus, in this paper, we report the results of an online survey involving 302 participants to investigate the influence of 10 musical factors. We also evaluate how a user’s personal characteristics (i.e., personality traits and musical sophistication) relate to the importance of each factor for the user. Moreover, we propose and evaluate three factor-based functions that would enable more effectively browsing songs on a music streaming service. The user survey results provide several reusable insights, including the following: (1) for most participants, the melody and singing voice are considered important factors in judging whether they like a song on first listen; (2) personal characteristics do influence the important factors (e.g., participants who have high openness and are sensitive to beat deviations emphasize melody); and (3) the proposed functions each have a certain level of demand because they enable users to easily find music that fits their tastes. We have released part of the survey results as publicly available data so that other researchers can reproduce the results and analyze the data from their own viewpoints.