Jazz Odyssey

This article discusses a research initiative in which an artificial music market was created in an effort to figure the impact of social influence in driving the popularity of a song or an artist. Two groups were created and presented with music…one group was presented with music without any indicator of how others in the group felt about the music, while the other group had additional data on how many times a song had been downloaded and a ranking score showing how others felt about the music. The results?

Researchers found that popular songs were popular and unpopular songs were unpopular, regardless of their quality established by the other group. They also found that as a particular songs’ popularity increased, participants selected it more often.

The upshot for markerters: social influence affects decision-making in a market.

This is an interesting though not terribly surprising outcome. For starters, following a socially established level of desirability is rooted in pure Darwinism–the non-conformist cavemen who insisted on hunting cobras for their dinner vs. a non-venomous snake didn’t make it out of the Ice Age. Then there’s the psychology of people not wanting to “miss out” on something that their peers or popular culture has deemed worthwhile. For some its a factor of curiosity–all of us at one time or another have simply said “gee…everyone seems to be watching/reading/listening to _______, it must be worth checking out.” This last point is the ideology that has catalyzed thousands of ad campaigns and will continue to do so for years to come.

It will be interesting to see how this changes over time, as barriers to the creation of entertainment and large corporate control over the means of distribution are eroding….are we headed for an era of millions of micro-mass markets? Will social networking alone spark the next Cabbage Patch Kids or Pokeman craze? Or will some combination of collaborative filtering, social networking, personalized advertising and AI technologies still under development actually drive the marketplace?

Stay tuned…you don’t want to miss out on anything!