The Sweet Hereafter Feb. 21, 2006: Uncaging the music nerd in all of us

Hey everyone,

So as part of my daily existence as an academic, I get to read articles on the visual cortex of the giant blowfly and the electrosensory computations of the weakly electric fish. It's interesting but nothing that enhances my weekly existence as a radio DJ. However, just a week ago, while perusing the Uber-journal named Science, I ran across an article looking at music markets. My interest was piqued. The researchers in question created artificial music markets composed of a group of unreleased music and studied how songs became popular, or not popular. And the interesting thing is, it varied. Some of the songs were really popular in some of the markets but not others, while some of the other songs were busts in some markets but relative successes in other markets. Thus, assuming that the makeup of each market was essentially the same, there doesn't seem to be any easy way to determine whether a song will be a success or not.

The article can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/296/5571/1302?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Duncan+watts&searchid=1140713916908_9714&FIRSTINDEX=0&journalcode=sci.pdf

I'll go into more details in the show. Or you can just turn down the volume for a couple minutes when you hear me talk about it, and turn it back up and your musical enjoyment should be unhindered.

Tuan