Cross-Cultural Exploration of Music Sharing

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Music sharing is a common social activity that people have long engaged in, from gifting mixtapes to sharing music links. Our practices around sharing music have shifted markedly with the advent of streaming music platforms and social media, and it has remained an important part of our social fabric. Yet there is a dearth of research on how people share music today, and our understanding of attitudes and practices of sharing music across cultures is even more lacking. To understand how people across cultures engage in music sharing, we have conducted interviews with 32 participants from two cultures: South Korea and United States. Through qualitative analysis, we found largely three reasons why people share music, types of music shared, strategy factors considered when sharing music, outcomes achieved, and challenges people experience when sharing music. We present a framework of music sharing that visualizes these components of the music sharing process. From these results, we identify similarities and differences that emerged. We derive design implications for music sharing platforms including providing varied avenues for feedback on shared music, motivating users to share more, and helping users to better manage shared music.