Music Streaming Research: FAQ

Fill in the screening questionnaire on this site. It takes about ten minutes and is how participants are selected.

If you are selected as one of the twenty participants, Miloš Hroch will contact you with all the relevant information. We will inform selected participants by the end of September 2026.

Participants record “walkthrough” videos using the screen recording their phone already has built in — Android and iOS alike. Following a short script, they then move through the Spotify or Apple Music interface. The videos are uploaded to the place set aside for them on this site, which keeps personal data in line with the GDPR.

Participants record themselves exploring the Spotify or Apple Music interface, following a prepared three-step script. First they scroll the streaming service’s interface all the way down, taking in each row and each recommended item on the way. Then they search for a playlist and explore Discover Weekly, Release Radar and New Music Friday CZ & SK. Participants record the three videos over the course of one month (at the start, in the middle and at the end). If anything is unclear, just ask and the researchers will be glad to help.

With the screen recording your phone already has built in, on Android and on iOS alike — so there is no app to download. Selected participants get a step-by-step guide. Have a look at the two model recordings (for Spotify and for Apple Music).

Spotify and Apple Music have full access to your data, but they are not always transparent about what they do with it. If you can share it with the platforms, you can share it with us too! Our method is transparent, and analysing the data lets us see what music Spotify and Apple Music recommend to you (in autoplay, for instance) regardless of your taste or your earlier choices. We will report interim findings from the analysis in a newsletter, if you would like. What is more, asking for your data activates your own rights under Article 15, “right of access by the data subject”, under the GDPR. The European research project Fair MusE has already used a similar “data donation” method (its Data and Donations section shows what the research team found).

Here are simple instructions for asking Spotify and Apple Music for your listening data.

Your participation lets us observe how recommendations on music streaming services work, and how visible Czech, Central and Eastern European, and European music is — how often local, regional and European work is recommended by platform algorithms. It helps shed light on how recommendations work and contributes to greater fairness and diversity in music streaming.

No. The Czech data will be complemented with data from four other European countries: Germany, Poland, Sweden and Romania. The research team will produce academic articles and policy recommendations, shared with European researchers, EU policymakers and music industry actors in Czechia and Central and Eastern Europe.

The script keeps you inside the music app, so what is visible is your library, playlists and recommendations. Before recording you are asked to turn on Do Not Disturb, which is what stops notifications appearing. If something you would rather not share does appear, delete that recording and make another.

Only the research team. Recordings are stored outside the public web and every download by a researcher is logged. Other participants cannot see your data, and neither Spotify nor Apple receives it.

Selected participants can revise their answers at any time from their participant area, and can delete or replace a recording.

The information in the screening questionnaire is collected only to recruit participants. Collected data is thoroughly anonymised and then uploaded to and shared via a trusted data repository, in accordance with open science principles and GDPR.

Yes. All data is handled in compliance with GDPR. If you want your data removed or altered, or have any concerns about stored data, write to milos.hroch@fsv.cuni.cz. You do not need to give a reason.

Because a password you would use a handful of times over one month is one you would either forget or reuse from elsewhere. Instead we e-mail you a single-use sign-in link. Access to your inbox is what proves it is you, and there is no stored password to leak.

Links can only be used once and expire after a while. Some corporate mail systems also open links automatically to scan them, which uses the link up before you click it. That is why every e-mail also contains a six-digit code — enter that instead, or request a new link.

Screen recordings are large — a three-minute one can be several hundred megabytes. Upload it here and then delete it from your phone; we keep our own copy. If a file is too big to upload on mobile data, try again on Wi-Fi.