Understanding the sociality of experience in mobile music listening with Pocketsong

Music listening practices are changing. Mobile, networked devices now offer rich opportunities not just for personal music consumption but also for personally broadcasting music and for sharing digital meta-data concerning tastes, preferences and general listening habits. However, experiences of music listening and sharing on the move and how this has been impacted by developments in mobile technology remain under-explored. In this paper we present an empirical study of the sociality of mobile music experiences, 'in the wild', using a new location-based mobile music-sharing application (Pocketsong), designed as a technology probe. We report users' experiences of Pocketsong (distilled from interviews), and critically examine the affordances of mobile music applications, the sociality of sharing and 'co-listening', and the relationships between digitally-mediated mobile music consumption and self-expression. Based upon this we reflect upon the interaction design challenges of developing mobile music technologies that work in digitally-mediated social spaces.