Please read both pieces linked here.
First, Duncan J. Watts writes:
As anyone who follows the business of culture is aware, the profits of cultural industries depend disproportionately on the occasional outsize success — a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist — to offset the many investments that fail dismally. What may be less clear to casual observers is why professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. ... Recent research, however, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know — a result that has implications not only for our understanding of best-seller lists but for business and politics as well. ...
... The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing. ...
Link: New York Times Magazine.
Then, in Cumulative advantage and 'the good stuff', Nico Flores responds:
... People usually don't know what they want until someone tells them what they might want. To an extent, word-of-mouth is taking over this 'discovery' role from broadcast media; but this does not mean that people's preferences are formed in isolation, that broadcast media won't play a role in this process, or that the process of discovery is simply one of matching consumers profiles with product attributes (it is that, but only up to a point). Persuasion, 'hits' and marketing are here to stay, and even without big media the process by which content becomes popular is not just a matter of merit. The very concept of quality ('the good stuff') becomes suspect. ...
... First, people's initial encounters with content are mediated by lists of stuff (or what I have elsewhere called aggregates) ...
... Second, lists articulate communities: when I look at a list I know I am joining a 'consumption community' (not my term; read an earlier post on this, and also this) of others who are also looking at it, one in which the list's author (when there is one) plays a leadership role. ...
... Finally, this has important implications for news. There, more than in any other genre, the three needs that Watts identifies (too much stuff; not knowing what to care for; and needing to know what others know) are crucial. ...
Link: On Demand Media. Very thoughtful pair of essays. --Dennis
Interesting set of articles, but I think that the Timberlake example is less apt than something like the American Idol phenomenon.
True, Timberlake was famous before, but he had bandmates that were equally as famous that put out records that were commercial flops. The difference was that Timberlake's records are quite good, crafted with care by some of the finest producers working today.
Idol is a better example because of the relative consistency of the artists' output after winning the title. Consistently average. Competent, unspectacular and average, for the most part. It is the forward momentum that sells those records and drives the popularity. When I see these artists videos on MTV and VH1, there is no clear superiority in their finished product. That is where the cumulative advantage really comes to the fore.
Posted by: WD45 | Friday, 01 June 2007 at 10:39