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Music

What Do Your Music Listening Habits Say About You?

Online music platform Harkive seeks to explain why we listen to what, when, where, and how we listen to it.
Music listening stories are also submitted through Harkive's Instagram

Listening to a song on vinyl can sound like a completely different track than when played digitally, synchronous to the reasons behind choosing one method over an other. By collecting data on listening habits like preferred playback formats, online music project Harkive hopes to provide an insight into today’s experience of popular music.

“I realized that we’re going through this really rapid change in terms of how we listen to popular music and I wanted to capture that in some way,” Harkive founder Craig Hamilton tells The Creators Project.. New technologies and social platforms have changed the way music is digested, where immediacy and an overabundance of choice defines newly founded digital listening. Companies too, now know a lot more about what’s being heard.

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“The data that’s collected about people’s music listening habits is usually from online services like Spotify or YouTube,” explains Hamilton, who is turning the Harkive project into a PhD at Birmingham City University. “But not all music listening takes place in those situations. I’m trying to get the stuff that isn’t being recorded and see what else it tells me.”

Having launched the project in 2013, Hamilton holds annual Harkive Days where music fans—the majority from the UK—submit their listening stories through social media, email, and even audio diaries. Some send tweets, while others “have written 2,000 words,” Hamilton says, while explaining how correlating the data for academia has been a “nightmare.”

Harkive stories on Facebook explain where people are when they listen to music and how they're listening

“I think the first thing that I’ve noticed is that we switch between the old and new very quickly,” he says. “We’re very comfortable with using a service such as Spotify, but we’re equally comfortable in going back to vinyl or radio. That’s pretty much across the board with gender and ages. Whether that will continue to be the case, I don’t know.”

With two years left in the research project, Hamilton has collected over 5,000 unique stories so far. While it doesn’t matter what people are listening to, Hamilton is focused on where, why and on what device. “Something I didn’t expect from the project is that people are talking about songs that they hear in their head. People consider these ‘earworms’ to be part of their music consumption alongside the stuff they have to pay for or already own,” he says.

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Hamilton, who formerly worked for a digital distribution company, recognizes that collecting data like this is potentially very valuable to those in the music industry. “I think the insights could ultimately be useful to music companies but hopefully they’ll also be very helpful to music fans,” he explains. “One of the things I’d like to do with the data is to make it available to people. I think in broader societal terms we don’t have a very good understanding about what happens to the data about us. There needs to be a lot more literacy and I hope to help in that perspective.”

Visit the Harkive platform to learn more about how your music differ.

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