What does music mood mean for real users?

Mood has recently received increasing attention as an interesting approach for organizing and accessing music. Our understanding of how users determine and describe music mood, however, is not fully developed. In this exploratory study, we investigate the concept of music mood from the end-user's perspective. In particular, we want to see how users describe music mood in their own terms as they react to different musical features. We investigate this by asking users to provide mood tags for various cover versions of the same song. The findings suggest that users rely on a small limited set of mood terms, although they do use a wide variety of terms. Typically, certain moods seem to carry over multiple cover versions despite differences in musical features. Along with lyrics, tempo, instrumentation, and delivery, factors like sources of mood, genre, musical expectancy, cultural context, etc. also seem to affect how people feel about music.