Padrões na preferência musical dos(as) brasileiros(as) sob a ótica do Spotify.

Abstract

Although music is present in the daily lives of much of humanity, during the Covid-19 pandemic, many artists in the music industry saw their options for making money from music diminish. With the ban on concerts and the low sale of physical products, the music market had to adapt to different business models in order to survive. In this scenario, Spotify, a digital service that pays artists by the amount of streams [1], has been representing a boost for the industry, which was already suffering heavy blows from piracy. As of April 2021, the service had more than 350 million monthly active users [2]; had paid billions of dollars to artists and record labels [7]; and, in Brazil, a country that is one of the largest streaming consumers - both in free and paid models [8] - is one of the main responsible for the growth, in the last 2 years, of more than 24% of income with songs recorded - the largest since 1996, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry [3]. In 2019, the relevance of streaming was so high that it represented more than half of the world's recorded music revenue[9]. With that, it can be said that, nowadays, the amount of streaming of a song has become a parameter of success and even na indication of what society, in general, listens to. Therefore, this article presents a quantitative data analysis of the most listened songs on Spotify Brazil, from 2017 to the present year, in order to help understand the musical taste of Brazilians through the study of musical characteristics of each song. With this, we seek to identify the patterns presented by these characteristics over the years. The results indicate that, in the studied sample, Brazilians tend to prefer songs with shorter duration, low instrumentality, high volume (in decibels), and low presence of spoken words.