Understanding Disclosure and Support in Social Music Communities for Youth Mental Health

Online music platforms that embed social features are enabling the creation of supportive social communities where many young people disclose their distressing feelings and seek support. However, there is a limited understanding of the content young people disclose or the support they may provide in such social music communities. In this work, using a large online music platform as our research site, we employed mixed methods to analyze users' comments (N=163) and the associated replies (N=2,732) related to young people's psychological distress (e.g., depression, anxiety, stress, and loneliness). We found that experience sharing dominates the types of comments, which often invokes peers' support in the form of encouragement, caring, or self-disclosure. Furthermore, we conducted an interview study with 13 young people to understand their perceptions of and motives for disclosure and support on our research site. The interviewees expressed that music-induced and comment-induced emotional resonance is the main drive for their disclosure and support. Finally, we discuss design implications for a supportive social music community that could benefit youth mental health.