Cross-cultural gender differences in the adoption and usage of social media platforms - An exploratory study of Last.FM

摘要

This paper examines cross-cultural gender differences in the adoption and usage of the social media platform Last.FM. From a large-scale empirical study of 3748 Last.FM users from Australia, Finland, Germany, and the United States of America, we find: (1) men listen to more pieces of music on social media platforms than do women; (2) women focus their listening on fewer musical genres and fewer tracks than do men; (3) women register on Last.FM later than do "early adopting" men (absolutely and in comparison to their friends), but at a younger age; (4) women maintain more virtual friendships on Last.FM than do men; and (5) women, when choosing music to listen to on social media platforms, are more likely than are men to choose tracks that correspond to mainstream tastes. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.