The talent? Fashion? That the lyrics are understandable to everyone? The physical aspect? The innovation? Dancing skills? They all seem like important factors when it comes to a song reaching the top of the sales charts . However, we are not sure which of these factors is the determining factor.
In fact, it sometimes seems that the difference between a band that succeeds and one that fails is very subtle. What if Madonna or the Rolling Stones existed in an alternate universe where we have barely changed some parameters, would they have achieved the same success? Is there something special that a winner will always have regardless of the context?
The universe of chance
To find out, in 2006, Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts conducted an experiment to conceive of a number of different digital worlds or scenarios in which an online music player similar to Spotify existed: Music Lab .
A total of 14,341 music fans were invited to listen to songs and rank them according to their tastes. All visitors to this platform were diverted to eight parallel websites, and each of these websites the same set of 48 songs performed by famous artists showed.
In the same way that happens on Spotify or other social platforms, Music Lab allowed users the possibility of taking a look at the music that other users were listening to: next to each song there was a figure that indicated the number of downloads .
All the platforms were exactly the same, with the same songs and the same functions. The only thing that changed was the people who entered each of them. However, there was a slightly different scenario than all the others in which the songs did not show the number of downloads, that is, where the users were blind to the success that that song had in the community . It was like preventing those typical commercial radio hit lists from existing.
Some songs triumphed on all stages, others failed on all. That is to say, there seemed to be virtues intrinsic to the music itself that favored its acceptance . However, among the shared successes and failures there were songs that triumphed on one stage but failed on another, that is, they were successful due to factors external to the quality of the song itself. Or put another way: there were songs that succeeded by pure chance, just as they failed because of the same.
What was more consistent, however, was that in the scenarios where the success of a song could be verified on a social level, there were more cases in which popularity was generated by popularity itself .
As Hannah Fry explains in her book Hello World : “Apparent popularity turned into real popularity, so potential success was arbitrarily magnified over time. There was a reason for these results: it is the phenomenon known to psychologists as social demonstration , or informational social influence. Whenever we find that we do not have enough information to make decisions for ourselves, we have the habit of imitating the behavior of those around us ”.
This trend occurs in any idea or cultural trait , so it is not only seen in music, but in cinema, theater or literature. That is why people are hired to applaud in theatrical performances. Or money is paid to appear on the bestseller list: “We use popularity as a substitute and benchmark for quality in all forms of entertainment.”
