The Science Behind What Determines Popularity

Can popularity be manipulated?

Happy Thursday, y’all! So today I wanted to talk about a fascinating research experiment into popularity that I came across a few years ago via NPR. Princeton professor Matthew Salganik attempted to learn why works of art become popular. In short, Salganik wanted to learn more about what factors determine if a piece of art is popular. He wanted to focus on two areas: The ‘quality’ of the art, the role (if any) that social influence played. Basically, he wanted to know if art was popular because it was good, or simply because other people liked it.

To conduct his experiment, Salganik decided to focus on music. He took 48 unknown songs from 48 unknown bands. Salganik purposely picked songs that he knew had not been heard by the people he would be surveying. This way, the people being surveyed would not have heard the songs before or even the artist. So they would have no preconceived notion of how popular or unpopular the songs would be. At least in theory.

Salganik surveyed 30,000 teenagers. What Salganik did was divide these teenagers into one of two groups;  The first group would listen to the music and then rate the songs from one to five stars.  Then after listening to the songs and rating them, the person would then have the opportunity to download the song for free.  This was the ‘independent’ group.