Investigating Music Track Liking in the Halo of Album Covers

Research on music retrieval and recommendation often neglects the fact that a user's response to a music track depends on contextual factors, such as the composition of the results list, the design of the user interface or the additional media displayed. However, a body of psychological research suggests that human perception and decision making can be strongly influenced by contextual factors. In particular, an initial positive aesthetic impression of a product may influence a buyer's perception of its features unrelated to appearance, such as utility or reliability, which is a manifestation of a cognitive bias called the halo effect. The work at hand investigates whether an album cover shown to the listener during playback can create a halo effect, influencing the listener's liking of the track. We approach this question by means of a two-stage user study. In the first stage, participants individually rated a series of album covers and music snippets. In the second stage, they were presented with music tracks and album covers (from those they indicated as unfamiliar to them at the first stage) arranged in pairs, such that their least liked tracks were shown with their most liked album covers and vice versa. The results show that displaying an appealing album cover while playing a music track results in a higher rating of the track.