Wednesday, February 15, 2006
The Power of Social Influences -- Pop Music Edition
How important are social influences in determining a song's popularity? This experiment suggests that they are (unsurprisingly) pretty important.
Here's the basic idea. Randomly assign a bunch of teens into two groups. In one group, participants choose songs from unknown groups based solely on title and group and then rate the songs. This establishes the "quality" of the songs. In the second group, people see the same lise of songs, but also see how often each song has been downloaded. In the end, "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."
Here's the basic idea. Randomly assign a bunch of teens into two groups. In one group, participants choose songs from unknown groups based solely on title and group and then rate the songs. This establishes the "quality" of the songs. In the second group, people see the same lise of songs, but also see how often each song has been downloaded. In the end, "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."
// posted by BW @ 3:27 PM 
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