  Repetition in music consumption is a common phenomenon. It is notably more
frequent when compared to the consumption of other media, such as books and
movies. In this paper, we show that one particularly interesting repetitive
behavior arises when users are consuming new items. Users' interest tends to
rise with the first repetitions and attains a peak after which interest will
decrease with subsequent exposures, resulting in an inverted-U shape. This
behavior, which has been extensively studied in psychology, is called the mere
exposure effect. In this paper, we show how a number of factors, both content
and user-based, well documented in the literature on the mere exposure effect,
modulate the magnitude of the effect. Due to the vast availability of data of
users discovering new songs everyday in music streaming platforms, these
findings enable new ways to characterize both the music, users and their
relationships. Ultimately, it opens up the possibility of developing new
recommender systems paradigms based on these characterizations.
