Survey Results: People's Habit of Listening to Music and Understanding How They Pick The Music They Listen to

As part of our Research and Development subject, we are asked to pick a topic of our choosing to do a report on. I chose the topic of Music & Emotions, and the idea is to learn and understand more about how music relates to people's emotions, how it affects people when listening to them, and what happens after they listen to them.

But reading other people's findings and papers is not enough. I have to do some primary research. One of the things I did is a survey. Specifically, a survey to understand people's habit of listening to music and understanding how they pick the music they listen to. I then divide the questions into two parts. The first part of the survey is to understand my demographics; their sex, their age, if they have any hearing disabilities and their musical knowledge. And the second is to determine the participants' personal preference/habit when listening to music; such as how many hours do they spend listening to music, on what occasions do they listen to music, what are their preferred methods of playback when listening to music, how important picking the music they listen to is, what is their preferred mood when listening to music and do they think that the music they are listening to can influence their mood. 

I actively conducted this survey on the 28th of July, and as of writing this post (31st of July), 34 people have responded.

Amongst the 34 participants, 11 are males and 23 are females.

And the age range between the participants is under 18-34 years old. The participants who picked the choice 'Under 18' can be confirmed that they are not babies or toddlers because the participants who helped answer this survey uses the web link I provided, and therefore means they are old enough to use a smartphone.

Out of the 34 participants, only 1 participant said they have some hearing problems, 29 participants said 'No', 2 participants said they don't know, and 2 participants said they have minor hearing problems.

When asked about whether the participants know any musical knowledge or have any musical background, 8 participants said they have a huge amount of knowledge on music. 17 participants said they have a little knowledge, and 9 participants said they don't have any musical knowledge or background at all.

From this point onwards, I asked the respondents about their music listening habits. One of the questions is how many hours do they spend actively listening to music, 3 people said 0-1 hour, 12 people said 2-3 hours, 11 people said 4-5 hours, 6 people said 6-7 hours and 2 people said more than 7 hours per day.

Then I asked the participants on what occasion/s do they listen to music and here is the result. Since a user is allowed to pick multiple answers for this question, we can clearly see that most of them listen to music when they want to wind down at home and relax. I conclude this as music being the answer for the respondents when they are feeling 'unrelaxed'. 'When I'm driving/traveling' and 'Public Transport' comes second and third respectively; understanding that the respondents are mostly on the go to do their business and needs music to accompany them when they want to go from places to places.

Then the next question I asked was what's the respondents' preferred methods of playback when listening to music. Like the previous question, the respondents can pick multiple answers. And 'Playlist or folder' came first with 91.18% of respondents picked this, followed by 'Artist, album or genre' and 'Shuffle on collection'. I conclude this result with a point that everyone has their own preferred music/artist/album/genre that they love and they would listen to those types of songs over and over again.

Then I wondered how important a song is and how do they pick the songs for their playlists. I let the respondents rank the options from 1-4, 1 being the most important and 4 being the least, and from this question, I found out that people mostly cared about the importance of picking each song carefully. Coming second is how the mood of a song comes to the importance. Now the third-ranked is 'Mood is irrelevant as long as it doesn't obstruct my activity', with a bit of a higher difference on the score, and 'Any music is fine' ranked last with a much higher difference of score from the third.

For this specific question, I apologize in advance if my wording might be confusing for people. But what I meant was there any state of mind a person wants to achieve when listening to music or do they prefer to be in a various mood, and 21 people said that they would like to achieve/stay in a certain mood when listening to music.

The last question I asked is an open-ended question. The question is "Do you feel that the music you're actively listening to can influence you to feel a certain emotion?" and almost every responds I got is 'Yes'. When they are feeling sad, they would listen to a 'happy' song and they feel that the song can change their mood to be happy. Or in some other cases, when they want to exercise or jog and they need an upbeat song to get their mood going. Some people also said that when listening to some particular songs, they feel like they triggered a memory that they've experienced and they can relive the memory just by listening to them. On the other hand, the only people that do not agree said that they are just an emotionless person and they feel that only listening to music is not effective enough for them to change their mood.