MIXTAPES

The MIXTAPES laboratory, jointly operated by the UMR Géographie-cités of the CNRS and Deezer, builds upon the ANR PRCE project 'RECORDS' ("User Listening Practices on Streaming Platforms," 2020-24), which in turn followed a continuous collaboration between the two partners since 2017. It is dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of listening dynamics on music streaming platforms. The research hosted in MIXTAPES will aim to achieve a better understanding of the social and spatial diversity of listening habits and tastes, the circulation of music trends and genres, and the relationship between individuals' declared music preferences in surveys and their effective streaming habits. The role of listening contexts and their influence on the selection of streamed repertoires will be a particular focus. To support its studies, MIXTAPE will implement and extend mixed research protocols that have been designed and validated by the partners in their previous collaboration. These protocols combine, while respecting GDPR regulations and guaranteeing respondents' anonymity, the streaming data collected by Deezer, with questionnaire survey data, interview data and other music databases. Therefore, MIXTAPES objective is to be a laboratory of computational and experimental social sciences, dedicated to the scientific study of contemporary music listening and taste. In addition to France, studies will be run in different European countries where Deezer is a major player in music distribution. The mixed data collected and the experimental research conducted will enable Deezer to innovate in the features offered to users for navigating and searching through the vast musical catalog of the platform, as well as in content recommendation features. For CNRS, MIXTAPES represents a unique opportunity to enrich fundamental research with new empirical material, documenting with great detail individual music and podcast consumption in daily life. Such an access to actual consumption data is entirely unprecedented among social sciences research units in France. After an administrative and legal setup period planned between September and December 2024, the joint laboratory will start its activities in early 2025.