Addison Road

A great article in the NY Times about how market rush can influence the popularity of certain songs and artists. In other words, songs become popular because they are popular with a heavily influential group of first movers. Read the article. The experiment they ran is fascinating.

… when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.”

Read the rest of the article:

Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? by Duncan J. Watts