M. Liu, E. Zangerle, X. Hu, Alessandro Melchiorre, Markus Schedl,
"Pandemics, Music, and Collective Sentiment: Evidence From the Outbreak of COVID-19"
: Proceedings of the 21th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2020), 2020
Original Titel:
Pandemics, Music, and Collective Sentiment: Evidence From the Outbreak of COVID-19
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Buchtitel:
Proceedings of the 21th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2020)
Original Kurzfassung:
The COVID-19 pandemic causes a massive global health
crisis and produces substantial economic and social distress, which in turn may cause stress and anxiety among
people. Real-world events play a key role in shaping collective sentiment in a society. As people listen to music
daily everywhere in the world, the sentiment of music being listened to can reflect the mood of the listeners and
serve as a measure of collective sentiment. However, the
exact relationship between real-world events and the sentiment of music being listened to is not clear. Driven by this
research gap, we use the unexpected outbreak of COVID19 as a natural experiment to explore how users? sentiment of music being listened to evolves before and during
the outbreak of the pandemic. We employ causal inference approaches on an extended version of the LFM-1b
dataset of listening events shared on Last.fm, to examine
the impact of the pandemic on the sentiment of music listened to by users in different countries. We find that, after
the first COVID-19 case in a country was confirmed, the
sentiment of artists users listened to becomes more negative. This negative effect is pronounced for males while
females? music emotion is less influenced by the outbreak
of the COVID-19 pandemic. We further find a negative
association between the number of new weekly COVID19 cases and users? music sentiment. Our results provide
empirical evidence that public sentiment can be monitored
based on collective music listening behaviors, which can
contribute to research in related disciplines.
Forschungs-