The music industry has always been notoriously unpredictable, and the old A&R motto that cream always adds to the top is far from given. For any band that makes a living from music, there are at least a thousand bands that have never been seen before - and the proportion of musicians who actually become rich through their work is still small. However, there is a general feeling [if not a real consensus] that the musicians who are really successful are there because they are inferior in some way better than the artists they left behind.
This is reminiscent of Robert M. Pirsigs' questioning about quality - what makes a product better, and is there really any objective standard to measure this quality? Most people will say that because they can easily judge whether a band is amazing or a bunch of useless hackers - but when it comes down to it, it's just personal taste and opinion. Although one can point out certain technical qualities, such as musicians, structural complexity and production value, music is not just the sum of its parts - people can't ignore sex pistols without Mozart's technical genius, only one can effectively rank Stockhausen The music is higher or lower than Willie Nelson's music. It seems that in terms of music, it must be instilled with an intuitive Philosophik Mercury because it is unpredictable. The only barometer we judge is whether we like it. Or what else?
Recent history is full of examples of works and artists that are now considered classic [or at least suddenly popular] and were initially directed by talent scouts, agents or industry executives. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and the Beatles - all belong to this category, as is the classic Pirsigs work. from
Zen and motorcycle maintenance art from
, returned 121 times. If this level of phenomenon may be overlooked, then only those talented artists have the opportunity to realize this? On the other hand, the entertainment field is full of artists, who will never want to be close to modest talent. So the entertainment industry really knows what it is doing, when many of its predictive hits fail and the unknowns that are rejected continue to appear on the leaderboards? Recent research seems to have no hint.
Now that Web 2.0 is in full swing, social media networks are changing the way we access and perceive content. The digital music era is approaching, and it is impossible to obtain new music from unsigned bands, creating a new economic model for distribution and promotion. Buzz itself is the latest buzz, and blog / IM / Email has become a very powerful tool for aspiring artists. Combined with the fact that a single download is now counted in the official chart position of the song, the promotion and release cycle of the new music can be done entirely online. But is this convenience easier to predict what will become?
The standard method for primary labels is to mimic already successful labels. On the surface, this seems like a very effective strategy - if you bring a woman who looks like Shania Twain, give her a song album that sounds a lot like a design album cover, and spend the same amount The money to promote her, then this new album will certainly be successful. However, this is usually not the case - on the contrary, another woman with all these characteristics [with the same quality of music] has nowhere to appear and continues to enjoy the pop star's spell.
This method is obviously flawed, but what is the problem? It's like this - assuming millions of people who buy a particular album are independent of each other. This is not the way people [in a collective sense] consume music. Music is a social entity, as is the person who listens to it - it helps define social groups, creating a sense of belonging, identity and sharing. Dealing with a set of such degrees is as if it were just a discrete unit of assembly that completely eliminates the social factors involved. Although a person who is separated from social influence may choose to listen to artist A, the same person in real life will introduce to the artist through their friends [whether local or online] and will eventually listen to artists C and K, possibly It has similar [or even lower] quality, but this is not the real point. Music can be as sound as an image.
This raises further questions about quality - is it a popular song based on some kind of chaos theory, everything else is equal? When promoting music, there is bound to be a cumulative advantage - an already popular song is more likely to become more popular than a song that has never been heard before. This can be clearly seen on social media sites like Digg and Reddit, where the popularity of the article can grow steadily until a certain critical number of votes is reached - at this point its readers will suddenly explode and Spread the virus. As we all know, this snowball effect will make a fairly powerful server come.
Duncan J. Watts and his colleagues recently conducted a fascinating study of the impact of social influence on personal perception and music consumption. An article in the New York Times describes this process. They used their own music lab website to study the behavior of more than 14,000 participants to determine which factors influenced their choice.
Participants are asked to listen, evaluate, and if they choose, download songs from bands they have never heard of. Some participants only saw the names of the songs and bands, while others saw how many songs the previous participants downloaded. In the second group, which we call social impact conditions, it is further divided into eight parallel worlds where participants can only see people's previous downloads in their own world. We didn't manipulate any of these rankings - all artists in the world started in the same way, with zero downloads - but since the different worlds are separate, they rarely find each other independently.
Although the article does not provide information on the demographic details of the sample audience, given the nature of the media [the online music site assesses user behavior on online music sites] and the size of the sample, it is fair to assume that the results will be fair. Reasonable indication. It turns out that this research has produced some very interesting revelations:
In all socially influenced worlds, the most popular songs are more popular than the independent ones [and the least popular songs are less popular]. At the same time, however, the specific songs that become popular songs are different in different worlds, as predicted by the cumulative advantage theory. Introducing social influence into human decision-making, in other words, is not as big as mission; it also makes them more difficult to predict.
Based on these results, an individual's independent assessment of the song is an important factor in its success that is far less than the social influence factor. If the inherent quality of truly measurable songs is overwhelmed by cumulative advantages, this means that some key votes at an early stage can fundamentally change the course of the entire selection process. This has some important influence on musicians, producers and promoters. In essence, this means that there are not many market surveys that allow you to accurately predict which songs will succeed. In the early stages of the process, the behavior of some randomly selected individuals, the behavior itself is arbitrary, amplified by cumulative advantage to determine whether the song progresses to the next level. The randomness of this process means that unpredictability is actually inherent
Orignal From: How social factors affect our music choices
No comments:
Post a Comment