New Study Claims That Most Music Fans Are Sheep
The age-old question:
“What makes a hit?” Ever since the American music industry was born, record companies have engaged in the endless search for that magic formula that will predict the “next big thing” with reliable accuracy. So far, no success. Record companies may have plenty of information at their disposal, but when you get down to it, choosing to market one artist over another is still little more than an educated guess.
A new answer:
According to new research findings released by a think tank at Columbia University this month, the commercial success or failure of a new song likely depends on factors far more unpredictable than music industry moguls may have previously thought. In reality, sales in the music industry may actually be inherently chaotic and random, making all attempts to accurately predict which songs consumers will like or hate all but impossible.
Recently, Columbia University’s Music Lab surveyed over 14,000 participants in order to "better understand how people form opinions about music and preferences for certain songs." The results were released last week in a New York Times article written by the head of Music Lab, sociology professor Duncan J. Watts. What the group discovered probably explains a lot about why the records given a positive review by trendy sites like Pitchfork Media, for example, see such high levels of success. It may also explain why so many awful (but popular) records go platinum, while plenty of the "quality" stuff goes nowhere. This is the first time such an experiment has been able to be carried out in the real world; before the Web 2.0 revolution and user-generated content made this study possible, record executives had to content themselves with theories on the factors that shaped music consumers’ tastes. Now there appears to be hard, quantitative data from which conclusions can be drawn.
What Music Lab found: Social influence, it turns out, plays a much bigger hand in determining a song’s success than previously thought. According to the study, the average music consumer’s own personal evaluation of a song is a far less significant factor than social influence factors. The study uncovered evidence that whether a song is of low quality or not has little to do with whether it sells. Rather, the main factor affecting the musical tastes of the average consumer is what their respected peers, journalists and other music reviewers say about the music. That’s right: The old adage about jumping off a bridge if everyone else went and did it too…well, it turns out that this applies to record sales. A random (and unpredictable) few of us will listen to a new artist, rate the artist, spread that opinion...and then the rest of us will form our music preferences largely based on these reviews. Personal evaluations of song quality come second. And while there’s a certain "song quality threshold," below which the song just sucks and won’t sell to anyone at all, that threshold is apparently quite low.
Your thoughts, fellow music fans? Does the Music Lab's study make you feel insulted? Vindicated? None of the above?
*Photos of sheep grazing peacefully within the safety of the herd courtesy of Wikipedia.
