Publications

Keyword(s): music consumer segmentation, gender differences, user studies methods, Youden Squares Design

Abstract: Over the last years there have been a number of entities within HP and HP-labs where music related technologies, e.g. MP3, CD writers, entertainment printers, are (or were) of interest. With the proliferation of e-services supporting online and physical shopping for music, it is more and more important to understand how people become aware of the music that they end up owning. Seventy subjects prioritised a list of 13 items pertaining to how they find out about music. We found that “Radio” was an absolute winner and “Internet” ranked at the bottom of the list. A good second was “A friend playing a CD to you”. We were able to segment the subjects along two dimensions. One dimension related to “broad” media, such as radio and TV as well as magazines and newspapers. The second dimension related to specific ways of finding out about music, e.g. going to a concert,a friend playing (specific) music to you. The main cluster (with a predominance of women) was centred around radio, TV, film and video. The segmentation allowed us to place subjects from a parallel in-depth interview study (Brown et al, 2000) in a wider context.