String Theory Media

We Knew You Were Sheep

Think your music taste is based on free will and independent thought? Do you believe that the music the most people think is best becomes the best-known? I always suspected not, and a very clever study by researchers at Columbia delivers a blow to keepers of radio stations and charts who claim their bland playlists are the decree of an efficient marketplace.

Thousands of young people downloaded and ranked thousands of tracks by relatively unknown independent artists. One group ranked the music based solely on their opinion about it. Another group was able to see how popular the various songs and artists were already. In the peer-aware group, the songs rated the best by the independent group didn't become the most popular. Music became well-thought-of merely because it was well known.

An excerpt from a story in LiveScience:

Although different songs were hits in each world, popularity was still the deciding factor, although the "best" songs never did very badly and the "worst" songs never did very well.

So what drives participants to choose low-quality songs over high-quality ones?

"People are faced with too many options, in this case 48 songs. Since you can't listen to all of them, a natural shortcut is to listen to what other people are listening to," Salganik said. "I think that's what happens in the real world where there's a tremendous overload of songs."

Now this doesn't mean that tracking hits in the real world is evil, but it is imperfect. And I still believe that the musical marketplace would work better if radio programmers and record promoters were driven more by guts and instincts than obsessing over their vaunted "research."

CPH

Champeta Beat

My wife and I just came back from the trip that sparked this blog. It’s long and still not finished. That's Louis Towers on the right. Great trip, by the way.  CH

Cartagena De Indias hugs a westward facing, crab-shaped bay on the north coast of Colombia, facing Panama and the azure Caribbean Sea. Charming beyond description, its old city, magnificently intact and free of brand name encroachment, invites long strolls, museum snooping, dozing and imbibing. It is as much a tourist town as San Juan, Puerto Rico or Kingston, Jamaica but the tourists are overwhelmingly Colombian. It’s the Miami Beach of a troubled country, a retreat from decades of insurgency and drug violence. And Colombians from working class on up support an undistinguished but thriving thicket of high-rises in the Bocagrande and Castillo Grande neighborhoods, as well as its Spanish colonial magnificence. It also has the coolest fort ever.

Cartagena is also, manifestly, a music city. Much like the former New Orleans in its color, heat and openness, Cartagena’s eateries, drinkeries, shops and vendor closets exhale music through old radios and CD players tuned into a sprawl of ramshackle radio stations and spinning a data storm of bootleg CDs. The streets and restaurants are also full of guitarist/troubadours and little nobody bands – poor people in a poor land where plying musical talent for a living is about as good a prospect as driving a cab or selling crisp Cerveza Aguila on the street.