The Influence of Audio Quality on the Popularity of Music Videos: A YouTube Case Study

Abstract

Video-sharing websites like YouTube contain many music videos. On such websites, the audio quality of these music videos can differ from poor to very good since the content is uploaded by users. The results of a previous study indicated that music videos are very popular in general among the users. This paper addresses the question whether the audio quality of music videos has an influence on user ratings. A generic system for measuring the audio quality on video-sharing websites is described. The system has been implemented and was deployed for evaluating the relationship between audio quality and video ratings on YouTube. The analysis of the results indicate that, contrary to popular expectation, the audio quality of music videos has surprisingly little influence on its appreciation by the YouTube user.