Evaluating Conflict Management Mechanisms for Online Social Jukeboxes

Social music listening is a prevalent and often fruitful experience. Social jukeboxes are systems that enable social music listening with listeners collaboratively choosing the music to be played. Naturally, because music tastes are diverse, using social jukeboxes often involves conflicting interests. Because of that, virtually all social jukeboxes incorporate conflict management mechanisms. In contrast with their widespread use, however, little attention has been given to evaluating how different conflict management mechanisms function to preserve the positive experience of music listeners. This paper presents an experiment with three conflict management mechanisms and three groups of listeners. The mechanisms were chosen to represent those most commonly used in the state of the practice. Our study employs a mixed-methods approach to quantitatively analyze listeners’ satisfaction and to examine their impressions and views on conflict, conflict management mechanisms, and social jukeboxing.