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The sound of salience: How platform design impacts consumption

Leonard Rackowitz & Ola Haampland

Information Economics and Policy2025https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2025.101144article
AJG 2ABDC A
Weight
0.41

Abstract

Digital platforms have become dominant in many industries. There is a growing concern that they may influence the transactions occurring within their ecosystems in a way that distorts consumer choice and market competition. The user interface is a particularly significant component of digital platforms, and as there is limited research on the causal relationships between platform user interface decisions and consumer choices, we examine platform power by estimating the effect of a major user interface design change by Spotify, the world's leading music streaming service, on actual playlist consumption. We exploit the fact that this widely reported design change brought a salience decrease for both the popular global and country-specific Top 50 playlists, as well as an increase in competition from a broadened offer of personalized playlists. Relying on streaming data for the daily top 200 songs in 38 countries and applying a regression discontinuity design, we find that the design change had a significant impact on the previously documented Top 50 playlist inclusion effect, a rigorous proxy of actual playlist consumption. The resulting reduction in inclusion effect was nearly identical in terms of percentage points for both the global and country-specific Top 50 playlists and their consumption levels dropped by more than half. This result suggests that user choices are substantially dependent on platform user interface decisions. Spotify is well-positioned to steer consumption effectively towards certain playlists, affecting the royalty payouts to rightsholders. We discuss implications for platform suppliers and regulators. • We investigate the causal impact of a major UI (i.e., user interface) design change of Spotify in 2018 on actual realized playlist consumption. • We use publicly available daily streaming data for Spotify's top 200 songs in 2017 and 2019 and apply a regression discontinuity design. • We find that UI decisions can impact users' choices. The UI design change had a significant impact on the previously documented Top 50 playlist inclusion effect—a rigorous proxy measure of actual playlist consumption. The Top 50 playlists' consumption levels dropped by more than half, whereby the reduction in inclusion effect was almost identical in terms of percentage points for both the global and country-specific Top 50 playlists.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2025.101144

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@article{leonard2025,
  title        = {{The sound of salience: How platform design impacts consumption}},
  author       = {Leonard Rackowitz & Ola Haampland},
  journal      = {Information Economics and Policy},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2025.101144},
}

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The sound of salience: How platform design impacts consumption

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Evidence weight

0.41

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.25 × 0.4 = 0.10
M · momentum0.55 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.