Show Your Face! Investigating the Relationship Between Human Faces and Music's Success

Streaming services are becoming the primary source for media consumption. Particularly platforms like SoundCloud, where users can disseminate user-generated content (UGC), are gaining relevance. To shed light into the drivers which positively influence the number of listeners, we draw from marketing literature related to depictions of people, which suggests that human faces can contribute to a higher degree of brand liking or brand identification. Thereupon, we propose a hypothesis which suggests that human faces on cover arts likewise generate more plays. We follow a data science approach using 1754 observations from SoundCloud and apply Google's facial recognition API (Vision AI) to examine the impact of human faces on music's success. We provide initial evidence that tracks with a human-face cover art yield in a higher number of plays compared to tracks with a cover art without a human face.