Your “adventuresomeness” quotient
How open are you to experimentation? Is your openness consistent across all situations? Or are there some instances where you seek to avoid experimentation and others where you actively seek out experimentation?
In a couple of my Kellogg classes, professors have recently mentioned openness to experience (one of the “Big Five” personality traits). Intuitively, I could think of people I’ve met throughout the years who seemed more or less open to experiences, but I was unaware that this was a key trait used to define the human psyche.
While designing the quantitative phase of my project on music discovery, I’ve been thinking about how this “openness” might relate to a listener’s propensity to seek out new music. Simultaneously, I came across this idea of an “adventuresomeness” quotient in Daniel Levitin’s book This Is Your Brain on Music (side note: this book did not engage me at all… a friend recommended I try Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia instead which is now sitting on my bedside table).
The idea of this “adventuresomeness” quotient resonated with what I saw in phase one of my project:
Some people have very specific, ingrained music tastes whereas others have a more flexible set of preferences that they are willing to adapt as they stumble upon new songs, artists, or genres
Broadly, most music fans could be categorized into one of these two groups. But a layer of nuance hides behind this generalization. Depending on context, a listener could easily flip between “give me what I know” and “give me something new.” Many potential situations come to mind. Consider these scenarios about Catherine, a hypothetical 20-year-old part-time student living in Chicago who typically listens to the same music. Catherine is:
- Bored at work and feels like finding some new music to fill her time
- With a friend who introduces her to a new genre she’s never heard of but turns out she loves it
- Training for a marathon and is looking for pump up songs
- Going to Lollapalooza and curious about some of the bands she’s never heard of before
The challenge is trying to identify not only WHO is open to discovering new music but WHEN they are feeling adventuresome. This challenge is the key limitation to creating a perfect, personalized discovery experience for each listener. There is not enough good information about the “adventuresomeness” quotient.
Currently, most products and features focus on identifying signals that might help infer how adventurous a listener might be feeling. But, there has not been a way for the listener to say in a clear and simple way, “Hey, today I’m feeling wild! Give me something new!”.
After completing a workout, the Nike+ Running app allows you to choose an emoji to represent how you felt during the workout.
What if this type of feedback could be embedded in a music listening experience? Maybe a screen upon opening the app to take a pulse check of that moment’s adventuresomeness. Or more nuanced thumbs up and thumbs down — I loved this song, I’m not feeling it today, I hate this type of music. Obviously, the simpler and less obtrusive, the better. But, why not throw this input into the mix?
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Libby Koerbel loves to analyze ambiguous questions, listen to live music, and meet new people. She is an expert strategist with experience at the Boston Consulting Group, Pandora, Universal Music Group, Muzooka, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. She is currently a MBA student at the Kellogg School of Management.
This post is a part of a series on how millennials discover content. Read some of the initial findings on millennial trends & new music discovery, as well as some musings on: framing uncertainty, curation wars, music tastes, sticky subscription models, and abundance.
