Kiite Cafe: A Web Service for Getting Together Virtuallyto Listen to Music

Kosetsu Tsukuda, Keisuke Ishida, Masahiro Hamasaki, Masataka Goto

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology(AIST)

Unlike listening to music alone, listening to music with others adds the qualities
Feel social connection with others Let others listen to one’s favorite songs(e.g., introduce others to her favorite songs)(e.g., attend a live concert) Various social conditions can make it difficult to get together in personand listen to music with others We propose a web service, Kiite Cafe, that enables people to get together
virtually to listen to music without losing the above qualities

Architecture 1

https://cafe.kiite.jp
Architecture 2

Visualization of each user’s reactions to a played song

Selection of played songs from users’ favorite songs

Cute!

Step 2

Step 1

 Four kinds of reactions: Favorite, Comment, Rotation, and Move
 Kiite Cafe does not provide any guidance on when users use
these functions because we want them to use it as they please

User Experience and Effect 1
Motivation to react to songs

 Step 1: select a user from users who are logged in to Kiite Cafe Step 2: select a played song from the user’s favorite songs
 Select a user/song fairly to diversify the played songs

User Experience and Effect 2

User Experience and Effect 3
Contribution as curators

Diversification of song listening
PopRock By sharing all the users’ reactions witheach other, Kiite Cafe motivates themto react to the currently played song The more users get together on Kiite Cafe,
the more meaningful it will be to show
their reactions

Jazz
 Listening to a diverse range of songs
enables users to find not only songs
that match their musical preferences
but unexpected or serendipitous songs
 A user will react to more diverse songs
on Kiite Cafe than when she listens alone

 A user can see the moments when otherusers start liking her favorite song When a user experiences the joy ofcontributing as a curator, she will lookforward to the next curation opportunityand stay on Kiite Cafe for a longer time

User behavior logs for five months by 1,760 users (Favorite: 29,127, Comment: 9,826, Rotation: 59,983, Move: 45,353)
Evaluation 1

Evaluation 2

For all reactions, a user reacts to a playedsong more frequently as the number ofusers on Kiite Cafe increases/𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎 𝑆𝑆𝑢𝑢𝑟𝑟 : song diversity before/after starting to use Kiite Cafe

 For all reactions, the diversity of songs
producing reactions increases comparedto that before starting to use Kiite Cafe
 Kiite Cafe is also useful for users to findsongs that are different from their daily
musical preferences

 Kiite Cafe has been used for several online events
 At an event on Aug. 29, 2020, a famous creator ofVOCALOID songs made a specific playlist
 During the one-hour event, 140 Kiite Cafe users
enjoyed simultaneously listening to the playlist
 Demonstrate a new style of online music events
 This kind of online event will also be valuable forusers who cannot easily attend physical eventsfor reasons such as geographic remotenessNormalized dwell time𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎 𝑆𝑆𝑢𝑢

Evaluation 3

Proportion of users who gave reactions

For Favorite, Rotation, and Move, the dwelltime increases as the proportion of users
who give that reaction increases
Contributions

 Proposed the two architectures
 Implemented and released Kiite Cafe Described three user experiences andtheir effects on users
 By analyzing user behavior logs,
we quantitatively showed that thearchitectures do provide the effects