Blogs are hitting their stride in the media game. Pop music has been around longer. So we should have a pretty good handle on what would make a song a winner, right?<\/p>\n
Nope. This short New Scientist<\/em> piece describes the difficulty of predicting what songs will become hits.<\/p>\n To some degree, the popularity of a song is influenced by the, um, popularity of the song. Participants of one study, for example,<\/p>\n tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But what researchers can’t figure out is what gets a trend going in the first place. Sociologist Matthew Salganik, Columbia University, is given the last word in the piece:<\/p>\n “Even if you haven’t made it yet, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s low quality music; you could just be unlucky. But it also suggests that even if it’s high quality music, you might not become successful.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So that’s it. It’s luck. lol<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Blogs are hitting their stride in the media game. Pop music has been around longer. So we should have a pretty good handle on what would make a song a winner, right? Nope. This short New Scientist piece describes the … Continue reading