Where´s the music? comparing the QoE impact of temporal impairments between music and video streaming

We are witnessing a dramatic rise of cloud-based media services nowadays, not only in terms of importance to end users but also in terms of traffic volume - a challenge for network and service providers alike. However, while the Quality of Experience of cloud-based video streaming services like YouTube has already become a well studied subject, this is less the case for music streaming services like Spotify and Deezer. In this paper we investigate the impact of temporal impairments on the QoE of music streaming. We present results from a subjective lab experiment which exposed participants to initial delay and interruptions (stallings) of playback when accessing streamed music via a Spotify service mock-up. Furthermore, we compare the results with other experiments conducted in the same lab that used equivalent study designs and setups but addressed video streaming instead. Our comparison reveals many similarities between music and video streaming (users preferring initial delay over stalling, generic relationships between impairments and QoE) but also substantial differences (e.g. user tolerance to stalling) between both service types.