Beyond Chasing the Cool

‘Beyond Chasing the Cool’ concerns an enquiry into the world of ‘music recommending mediated by social media’. Our main goal has been to describe, explain and predict some of the intended and unintended consequences of a proposed design choice to scrobble ‘anywhere, at any time’. Our research reveals some generic mechanisms that explain what it is that make people form and enjoy groups around immaterial objects like recommendations, about what makes them keep coming back and participating at social media, and what designers can do to manage these processes and to trigger various mechanisms that make people move towards or away from designed goals of social media mediated (music) recommending. Based on findings from a series of interviews done at Last.fm in London(2009) we created a model in which Lock-in, Democratizing and Authority ranking are the critical end-state processes for understanding and predicting the effects and changes in social media on the human activity of recommending by their (non-) users.