A 24-week comparison of an open playlist and a single curator finds no difference in skips, and the University now holds every shared playlist fixed for the term.
Open-edit and single-curator Fridays logged the same skips, and the speaker's skip control has been switched off
For twenty-four Fridays a social club’s speaker played either everyone’s music or one person’s, and the room skipped at the same rate. The Shared Playlist as Suggestion Box, a poster released today by Mr Eivind Onwuka with Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Solveig Adeyemi of the School of Continuous Improvement, sets out the result.
What we have learned about ourselves is that we can sit through a long Friday and come out with a firm view on the next one.
— Eivind Onwuka, Doctoral Candidate, School of Continuous Improvement
The study alternated an open edit link and a single curator across the club’s weeks and read the speaker’s own skip log against a margin set in advance. The two arrangements fell inside it. The University does not take that as a reason to leave the matter open. From the first Friday of term the playlist is held at its final state, the edit link is withdrawn, the curator role lapses and the skip control on the shared speaker is switched off, with no override for the convenor. The same arrangement applies to every shared playlist the University operates.
Dr Adeyemi, Lecturer, said the frozen list “gives the afternoon a shape it was already keeping.” The work belongs to the School’s continuing attention to how shared rooms come to sound the way they do, and the University regards the matter as furnished.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.uux7rt.