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International Conference on Social Informatics

SocInfo 2014: Social Informatics pp 508–530Cite as

Cultural Attributes and their Influence on Consumption Patterns in Popular Music

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8851))

Abstract

In this paper we leverage recent developments in the way scholars access, collect, and analyze data to reexamine consumption dynamics in popular music. Using web-based tools to construct a dataset that distills songs’ musical content into a handful of discrete attributes, we test whether and how these attributes affect a song’s position on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Our analysis suggests that attributes matter, beyond the effect of artist, label, and genre affiliation. We also find evidence that the relational patterns formed between attributes—what we call cultural networks—crowds songs that are too similar to their neighbors, adversely affecting their movement up the charts. These results suggest that culture possesses its own sphere of influence that is partially independent of the actors who produce and consume it.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France

    Noah Askin

  2. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA

    Michael Mauskapf

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  1. Noah Askin
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  2. Michael Mauskapf
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain

    Luca Maria Aiello

  2. Stanford Graduate School of Education, 485 Lasuen Mall, 94305-3096, Stanford, CA, USA

    Daniel McFarland

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Askin, N., Mauskapf, M. (2014). Cultural Attributes and their Influence on Consumption Patterns in Popular Music. In: Aiello, L.M., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8851. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_36

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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