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

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.