The music industry has always been notoriously unpredictable, and the old A&R maxim that the cream always rises to the top is far from a given. For any band that makes a living from their music, there are at least a thousand who never will, and the proportion of musicians who actually get rich through their work is even less. However, there is a general feeling (if not an actual consensus) that the musicians who make it are there because they are, in some way, inherently better than the swaths of artists who are left in their wake.
This is reminiscent of Robert M. Pirsig’s question about quality: what makes something good? Is there really some objective standard by which that quality can be measured? Most people would say yes as they can easily tell if a band is awesome or a bunch of talentless hackers but when it comes down to it this is nothing more than personal taste and opinion. Although certain technical qualities such as musicianship, structural complexity and production values can be pointed to, the music is more than the sum of its parts: the Sex Pistols cannot be dismissed as lacking the technical genius of Mozart, as nor can Stockhausen’s music be effectively ranked above or below that of Willie Nelson. It seems that when it comes to music, you have to instill in it a Philosophik Mercury that is as intangible as it is unpredictable. The only barometer by which we can judge is whether we like it or not. Or is there something else?
Recent history is littered with examples of works and artists that are now considered classics (or at least have become enormously popular) that were initially immediately rejected by talent scouts, agents, or industry executives. Harry Potter, Star Wars, the Beatles – they all fall into this category, as does Pirsig’s classic work. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, which was rejected 121 times. If phenomena of this magnitude could be overlooked, then what chance do moderately talented artists have of ever being noticed? On the other hand, the entertainment sphere is teeming with performers who could never aspire to be anything close to moderate talent. So does the entertainment industry really know what it’s doing, when so many of its predicted hits fail miserably and rejected unknowns keep turning up with hits on the charts? Recent research seems to suggest not.
Now that Web 2.0 is in full swing, social media is changing the way we access and perceive content. The era of digital music is upon us, and the ease with which new music from unsigned bands can be obtained has created a new economic model for distribution and promotion. Buzz itself is the latest buzz, and word-of-blog/IM/email has become a very powerful tool for aspiring artists. Combined with the fact that individual downloads now count towards a position on the official song chart, the cycle of promoting and distributing new music can take place entirely online. But does that baffled convenience make it any easier to predict what will become a hit?
The standard approach of major labels is to emulate what is already successful. At first glance, this seems like a perfectly valid strategy: if you choose a woman who looks a bit like Shania Twain, you give her an album of songs that sound the same, an album cover with a similar design, and you spend the same amount of money to promote it, then surely this new album will also be a success. Often, however, this is not the case; instead, another woman possessing all of these characteristics (with music of a similar quality) appears out of nowhere and continues to enjoy a spell of pop stardom.
This approach is clearly flawed, but what’s the problem? It’s this: the assumption that the millions of people who buy a particular album do so independently of one another. This is not how people (in the collective sense) consume music. Music is a social entity, just like the people who listen to it: it helps define social groups, creates a sense of belonging, identity and shared experience. Treating a group of such magnitude as if it were just a compilation of discrete units completely eliminates the social factors involved. While a single person, cut off from social influences, may choose to listen to Artist A, the same person in real life will meet artists through their friends, either locally or online, and end up listening to Artist A instead. Artists C and K, which may be of similar (or even lower) quality, but that’s not the real point. Music can have as much to do with image as it does with sound.
This raises more questions about quality: is a song’s popularity based on some kind of chaos theory, all other things being equal? There is certainly a cumulative advantage effect at work when promoting music: a song that is already popular has a better chance of becoming more popular than a song that has never been heard before. This is clearly seen on social networking sites like Digg and Reddit, where an article’s popularity can steadily grow until it reaches a certain critical mass of votes, at which point its readership suddenly explodes and it goes viral. Such snowball effects have been known to bring fairly robust servers to their knees with incoming traffic.
Duncan J. Watts and his colleagues recently conducted a fascinating study on the effects of social influence on an individual’s perception and consumption of music. The process was described in a NY Times article. Using their own Music Lab website, they studied the behavior of more than 14,000 participants to determine what factors influenced their selections.
Participants were asked to listen to, rate and, if they wished, download songs from bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants only saw the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group, in what we call the social influence condition, was divided into eight parallel worlds so that participants could see previous downloads from people only in their own world. We do not manipulate any of these rankings: all artists on all worlds started out identically, with no downloads, but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of each other.
Although the article does not provide information on the demographic details of the sampled audience, given the nature of the medium (an online music site that assesses user behavior on online music sites) and the size of the sample, it is probably fair to assume that the results are reasonably indicative. As it turns out, the study produced some very interesting revelations:
In all of the socially influenced worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision-making, in other words, not only made the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.
According to these results, an individual’s independent evaluation of a song is a much less significant factor in its success than social influence factors. The intrinsic quality of a song, if it can be measured at all, is outweighed by cumulative advantage, which means that a few key votes at an early stage can radically alter the course of the overall selection process. This has some significant implications for musicians, producers, and promoters. Essentially, it means that no amount of market research can allow you to accurately predict which songs will be successful. The behavior of a few randomly chosen individuals early in the process, whose behavior is itself arbitrary in nature, is eventually amplified by cumulative advantage in determining whether a song advances to the next level. The randomness of such a process means that unpredictability is actually inherent in the