Indicators of Country Similarity in Terms of Music Taste, Cultural, and Socio-economic Factors

Considering the cultural background of users is known to improve recommender systems for multimedia items. In this work, we focus on music and analyze user demographics and music listening events in a large corpus (120,000 users, 109 events) from Last.fm to investigate whether similarity between countries in terms of cultural and socio-economic factors is reflected in music taste. To this end, we propose a tag-based model to describe the music taste of a country and correlate the resulting music profiles to Hofstede's cultural dimensions and the Quality of Government data. Spearman's rank-order correlation and Quadratic Assignment Procedure indeed indicate statistically significant weak to medium correlations of music taste and several cultural and socio-economic factors. The results will help elaborating culture-aware models of music listeners and in turn likely yield improved music recommender systems.