Your taste in music is shaped by the crowd

[harass]

Stolen from : http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8702

People like a song more when they think other people like it too, a new study suggests. But the interactions between individual and group opinions are so complex that it is impossible to predict whether a good song will be a hit or a flop, according to researchers who asked people to rate the quality of music by unknown bands.

Sociologists Matthew Salganik and colleagues at Columbia University in New York, US, recruited more than 14,000 people to visit a website with 48 songs by relatively unknown bands. People could listen to songs, rate them, and then decide whether to download them.

One group of participants saw only the names of songs and musical groups. Other participants also saw how many times a particular song had been downloaded by others. Both groups broadly agreed about which songs were good and which were bad.

But participants who could see how often a song had been downloaded tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.

Different worlds
But a track with hit potential does not always become a hit, it seems. The researchers divided the socially influenced group (which could see the download information) into eight different "worlds", so that only the downloading decisions within that world were visible.

They found that the same songs did not always make it to the top of the charts. For example in one world, a Milwaukee pop punk band called 52Metro were stars, reaching number 1 in the download charts. In another world they were losers, ranked 40 out of 48.

"From outside of the industry, it seems like music executives can create stars at will. But we only see the ones that become successful. We don't see all the failures," Salganik says.

Locked in
Final chart positions were not entirely random though. For example, all of the songs that were hits in the socially influenced groups were also rated as good by the group with no access to the download information. And the results did not reflect a simple "lock in" effect – i.e. a song that got an early lead did not necessarily maintain that lead. But beyond that, Salganik says, the dynamics are hard to understand.

"This is very exciting research,” says Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell University, Ithaca, US. "What they're addressing is a puzzle – why is it so difficult to predict what will be a hit movie or a hit song?"

For hopeful start-up bands, the results mean good news and bad news, Salganik says: "Even if you haven't made it yet, it doesn't necessarily mean it's low quality music – you could just be unlucky. But it also suggests that even if it's high quality music, you might not become successful."

Journal reference: Science (vol 311, p 854)

[harass]

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The official rules and deadlines for the six newly announced challenges are still open and NASA will collect comments until 27 March.

[deccard]

Stolen from : http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8702

People like a song more when they think other people like it too...

or just "don´t believe the hype"

interessting study that shows how peoples taste is influenced by grouppressure. who likes to be an outsider with his special music taste. like what the others like and life is easier even in your small "underground" peer group.

[thomasjaldemark]

its like that.

you cnat invent the wheel all the time.

[vermi]

what a surprise that a newspaper called vg here in norway had the exact same story today, interviewing one of the "scene" tops of commercial music here in norway.. now that i read this, it seems like the guy just translated this article and said the same thing to the norwegian newspaper hehe :p

[nowayback]

i can't see what is the useful outcome of this study.
people tend to form opinions based on what others think in a much broader
spectrum than music. whether that's politics, social activities, or whatever
else stimulates our interests, we tend to considerate thoughts and tastes of
other people in order to weigh them against the ones we already have or are
willing to form. it's pretty normal i think. and i'm not talking about a sheep
attitude, it's just that this is the way we actually grow up, absorbing info,
sounds, tastes, smells from our surroundings, from our family environment, from
friends etc. of course all the media input we absorb is a heavy and decisive
influence. but all in all, it's a very complex subject to get safe results off it.

[Der geile Ami]

there are too many exceptions. how many times have y'all been at a aprty where the crowd goes nuts for a track, youve never heard it before, but that is precisely the moment you want ot go to the other room?

[Renze]

I saw something interesting about this on tv once. Apparently this group thing is part of human nature. There was a test in the 60's or 70's where a student was invited to do a 'perception test'. The student had to compare a line with 3 other lines, and pick the line that was of equal length. He did this together with other students. What he didn't know though, was that the other students were really actors, and the test wasn't about perception, but about group psychology. The group of actors would intentionally give the wrong answer, even though it was very clear that it was the wrong answer. The student was confused at first, but later on he adapted to the group and gave the same, wrong, answers the rest gave. Really weird.