Digital Music: You Are What You Listen To
by Lane Jennings
What do your favorite songs tell others about you?
It used to be that owning a collection of "great books" was a way to show
your status and sophistication: Your identity was revealed by what you read. Increasingly,
however, it may be your musical library that best proclaims your identity, thanks to the
ease of digital file sharing and portable devices such as the iPod.
The relationship people have with their music is so personal that some theft victims
report feeling violated when their carefully constructed music collections disappear with
their MP3 players.
A recent study by Georgia Tech and the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) found that
workers who shared their personal lists of music downloads tended to judge others by the
selections on their lists. So playlist-sharers carefully edited their own lists before
posting, so as to appear to have broader, less extreme, or simply "cooler"
musical tastes.
Technologies allowing music lovers to exchange music online now also track other
people's selections. Software like Apple's popular iTunes program enables users to select
favorite performances from a huge list of commercial recordings. Instead of actually
copying the music, the listener creates a playlist of selections; the music files remain
stored on the host computer. This avoids violating the producers' copyrights, but also
makes it easy to track who is listening to a given piece of music, and how often. It's
like having your own portable jukebox, but one with a built-in statistician keeping tabs
on your listening tastes.
Sharing playlists is already popular among college students, and now co-workers are
doing it, with some interesting implications for the workplace. For instance, in the
Georgia Tech/PARC study, the 13 employees who made their personal playlists available to
colleagues all did so anonymously. Yet, participants were curious enough to spend
considerable time and effort guessing who had compiled which list, the researchers
observed. The subjects also worried about what colleagues—particularly their
managers—might think of their own selections.
The researchers conclude that music sharing served to build a community within the
workplace studied. "People sharing music in our study were aware of the comings and
goings of others in the office because they noticed the appearance and disappearance of
others' music in the network," reports Amy Voida of Georgia Tech. "They were
aware of the musical holes left when someone left the company. . . . What once was an
individual jukebox became a music community."
Source: Georgia Institute of Technology, Research News and Publications Office, 75
Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 100, Atlanta, Georgia 30308. Web site www.gtresearchnews.gatech.edu.
