In his paper, Superstardom in Popular Music: Empirical Evidence, William A. Hamlen, Jr. talks about the two views of the popular music market. (If that link doesn’t work, try here. You might need to access through the Cornell library system.) I have come across both views as well in my perusal of scholarly articles on the subject. One view is that people don’t quite know anything about actual music or singing quality and simply follow everyone else in their preference of songs, as in a non-informative information cascade. The other view is referred to as the “Superstar Phenomenon” (attributed to Marshall 1947 and Rosen 1981) in which a small difference in voice talent leads to a disproportionately large level of popularity. These people then earn tons of money and take over the industry.

This second view relates to the power law, in which these superstars are the unexpectedly hugely popular part of the population. Marshall and Rosen, among others, propose that a slight increase in talent can coincide with a huge increase in popularity, thus obeying the power law.

According the Hamlen, this superstar view is the one that is widely accepted by the common press and economic literature, but without any evidence. He uses a log-linear demand equation with variables that represent various attributes of the singer and the demand. For example, he attempts to quantify voice quality with external objective ranking systems. (In one case they examined one word sung by many singers – the word, obviously, was “love.”) Later on they compared their voice quality rankings between men and women and different types of singers to be sure that the coefficient did not vary between regimes. Other testing variables that went into the equation involved the singer’s sex and previous career length.

Hamlen found that career longevity was the most influential factor in record sales, followed by the advantage of being a female singer. The fact that a singer who has already sold plenty of albums is typically shown to have higher record sales relates to the “rich get richer” scheme from lecture. The singing talent also showed a significant correlation to a singer’s success, with an R² = 0.79. This high value shows that the first theory – that pop music listeners cannot discern talent – is not quite right. However, the correlation isn’t close enough to 1 to say that the “Superstar Phenomenon” is completely accurate either.

So in the end Hamlen did not find empirical evidence for this second theory. He did show, however, that the correlation between record sales and previous success is much higher than that between sales and actual quality. So it appears that there is a smaller-scale version of superstardom, and that we music listeners deserve some credit for our taste.

The less experimental evidence that I personal can see is in the comparison of the success between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. I don’t know too much about this, but from my perspective it looks like Britney (disregarding her current behavior) ended up more popular and with more records sold, while Christina was obviously way more talented. Actually Christina was very talented, while Britney was just a long-lasting face that marketed well. So it looks like the talent helped Christina, but not as much as the strong career-length helped Britney.

This model is only a scraping of the numerous studies on music popularity. Many discuss network effects applied to a song’s or a singer’s emergence and popularity. In lecture we talked about the Salgankik, Dodds, and Watts study through a music downloading site which showed that popularity levels are unpredictable, but which agrees with Hamlen’s case that previously-demonstrated popularity helps current popularity, and talent isn’t completely disregarded by the music-listening and -buying audience. So Hamlen found that we can’t always blame everything in pop culture on blind herding and information cascades.

And it certainly is reassuring that Britney’s success might not have happened if we were to re-run history. But I like to think that Christina would still be going strong.