In class we talked about different applications of Information Cascades, one of which was best-selling books. The music industry is a similar application. There is a best-sellers list for music, and being on the best-sellers list obviously helps musicians when they’re selling albums and when radio stations are choosing which songs to play. But today listening to music is a lot different from reading a book. You can read reviews about books, maybe read summaries or flip through a few pages. But when it comes down to it you get very little information about a book before you buy it, and your best source of information is really other people’s actions. But most people have heard an entire song on the radio before they go to buy an album. Even if they havent, most songs are available online to stream for free, and a lot of stores (I havent been shopping in a while, but I know at least barnes and noble does) have a way to let you preview each song on a CD. So there’s actually quite a good deal of information that someone can get about a CD before making a purchase, there’s no reason to believe that the music industry would behave like the books.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?_r=4&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

This article, however, discusses how success in the music industry is rarely related to talent or even how good the music is. While, of course, many musicians are very talented, I think the point of the article is that there is not a strong correlation between success and talent. Producers seem to have an impossible time predicting which musicians will become stars and which ones wont make it very far, no matter how much experience they have. They say it comes down to being popular at the right time, and that success follows a “rich get richer” pattern. Much like information cascades, when artists get off on a good start, they tend to be more successful as buyers tend to buy what’s popular.

What the article said that was most interesting was that buyers tend to follow this pattern even when they dont have to actually buy anything. The writers did an experiment where they created many different “universes,” and in each universe ran a survey. Each subject listened to a collection of 48 songs and chose their favorites. In some universes the subjects were allowed to see previous results. And what came out of this was that when buyers were able to see past choices, they tended to pick the same favorites. When they couldnt, the favorites were more evenly distributed. Also, the example cited in the article states that in one universe, the song that ranked 26 overall became the number one hit because the first couple subjects happened to like it best. What’s most interesting about this is that the subjects actually thought they liked the songs better when other people liked the songs. It doesnt seem like anyone else should have any ability (especially someone random) to tell what kind of music you like, but people fell into cascades anyway.