"The Science of Hit Songs" Bjorn Carey
This by Bjorn Cary that was published in Live Science online journal explains a study focused on explaining how music becomes popular. The study supports the claim that personal music preferences is based on the preferences of others. They did this by isolating partcipants from social influenece by providing them only with the basic song information as they listened to each song. This helped "measure the quality of the songs and allowed us to see what outcome would result in the absence of social influence". Here lies my first problem with the article. It does not explain how to assess what good or bad music is. Cary begins his piece with " when Ashlee Simpson tops the charts while a critcally acclaimed ex-Beatles album fails to crack the top 200, eyebrows go up in the marketing world. Cary never adress why "bad" or lower quality music is good in the first place. The research reaffrims that notion that people reality on other's to formulate decisons. I think this is abvious. Of course if all of your friends abdore the new Ashlee Simpson hit, you'd want to give it a try. I think the more important question is why are these songs popular in the first place? I'd like to know why songs like these are hyped so much that people share them with others.
One of the researchers, Salganik, says that " a desire for compatability with others would drive the choice, since much of the pleasure from listening to music and reading books stems from discussing them with friends...'If everyone is talking about Harry Potter , you want to read it too."
I think theres a difference between being curious, and actually liking the song. You may want to read Harry Potter, but it doesn't mean that you're going to like it. What I really want to know is why so many people fell in love with Harry Potter. How can all of this people have such a uniform taste?
I want to know what is this common thread. This would be a more interesting topic for the researchers to go into.
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