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mmJun: a music study
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Date Posted: 03:50:49 02/10/06 Fri
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Study: Little rhyme or reason to picking hit songs!
If you think there is no rhyme or reason to what songs make the top
music hits of the week, you may be partly right, researchers said on
Thursday.
They tried to find a way to predict which songs would be popular, and
found it very difficult.
The researchers used the Internet to create an artificial market for
singles, all recorded by bands not on the current Top 40 hit parade in
the United States.
They then persuaded more than 14,000 young Internet users to log onto
the site and choose their favorites.
In a finding that may console losers in both the market and in
contests such as this week's
Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, they said the most popular songs were
not always the songs that people thought were the best.
"The very best songs never do terribly but they can only do OK,"
sociologist Duncan Watts of Columbia University in New York, who
directed the study, said in a telephone interview.
"The very worst songs never do brilliantly but they can also do OK."
While people do genuinely seem to like some songs better than others,
their preferences change once they know what other people like, Watts
and colleagues found.
"The popular things become more popular and the less-popular things
get less popular," Watts said.
People, it seems, do not entirely trust their own taste when it comes
to music. The same may hold true for books and movies and may explain
why the top sellers vastly outsell the rest, the researchers concluded
in their report, published in the journal Science.
To judge quality, Watts and his team allowed their 14,000 mostly
teenage volunteers to choose songs randomly. "If a lot of people
independently vote for a song, we are going to call that quality,"
Watts said..
TRUSTING THEIR OWN JUDGMENTS
"While listening to a song, they were asked to assign a rating from
one star (I hate it) to five stars (I love it), after which they were
given the opportunity to download the song," the researchers wrote.
"The music for the experiment comes from http://www.purevolume.com, a
Web site where bands can create home pages and post their music for
download."
Watts does not believe that people are consciously allowing themselves
to be influenced.
"They think they trust their own judgment," he said.
"What makes social influence difficult to understand is that we are
often unaware of it. We always think we are voting without
preferences. We don't think we like bad songs. We actually persuade
ourselves that we think it's good and that we would think it was good
even if our friends didn't like it."
And in the real world, marketing and other pressures add to the
confusion, he said. Payola, for instance, occurred when radio disc
jockeys were paid to play certain songs, which in turn influenced
listeners both through repetition and by creating the impression that
a song was already popular.
Watts believes the findings will hold true for other things such as
books, movies and art.
"People think they have opinions about modern art but nobody really
knows anything about it," he said.
And perhaps most importantly, Watts said the experiment showed that
the Internet can provide a useful way to study behavior on a mass
scale. Many social and psychological experiments are now done using
university undergraduates who volunteer.
"Try putting 14,000 teenagers in a lab. That wasn't possible a few
years ago," he said.
"There are all sorts of interesting questions we can ask about how
society makes choices or solves problems."
/ ------------------------ /
rv_pinoypopsuperstar · Regine Velasquez: Pinoy Pop SuperStar
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rv_pinoypopsuperstar/
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v_thebirdnest · Regine Velasquez Fans Bird Nest Group!
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