[wmsiler]

This is not directly related to this article (which I liked), but instead to the topic in general.

I heard of a study a few years ago where researchers divided a bunch of teenagers into a few groups (each of which was quite large), and each teen was allowed to go to a website and hear a collection of songs (same songs for everyone). Each person could then vote on which was their favorite and, importantly, they could see how many votes that song had already gotten just within their group. The researchers wanted to see if the same songs were picked as the favorite across different, isolated groups. The result was that each group had chosen completely different songs as their favorite. These groups were large enough that they were probably all statistically similar. Once people in a group saw that some song already had a lot of votes, they were more likely to pick it as their favorite as well. This suggests that in the world of pop music, success may have more to do with luck and social influence than with talent.

Ah, I found a link to a description of the study: https://www.npr.org/2014/02/27/282939233/good-art-is-popular...

[tokai]

Sounds like the good old Matthew Effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect