A Reproducibility Study on User-centric MIR Research and Why it is Important

Reproducibility of results is a central pillar of scientific work. In music information retrieval research, this is widely acknowledged and practiced by the community by re-implementing algorithms and re-validating machine learning experiments. In this paper, we argue for an increased need to also reproduce the results and findings of user studies, including qualitative work, especially since these often lay the foundations and serve as justification for choices taken in algorithmic design and optimization criteria. As an example, we attempt to reproduce the study by Kim et al. presented in the RecSys (2020) paper ''Do Channels Matter? Illuminating Interpersonal Influence on Music Recommendations.'' By repeating this study on how interpersonal relationships can affect a user's assessment of music recommendations on a new sample of n=142 participants, we can largely confirm and support the validity of the original results. At the same time, we extend the analysis and also observe differences with regards to adoption rates between different channels as well as different factors that influences the adoption rate. From this specific reproducibility study, we conclude that potential cultural differences should be accounted for more explicitly in future studies and that systems development should be more explicitly connected to its intended target audience.