Information Cascades and Viral Songs
Every small musician has the dream of making their song or album go viral. But too often this is confounded with a very vague understanding of what virality really is. To most people, virality is some sort of magic luck that occurs with any song by dumb luck.
When I tried to break down the definition of what it means to be viral, I initially though I could trace it back to information cascade chain. Specifically when a large cascade of information about a song is shared and reshared constantly through social media by many people in a row.
However, after reading the article regarding Kylie Jenner, whose posts on Snapchats have caused massive amounts of publicity for the respective musicians such as Khalid, I began to question my initial thought of “viral” being connected to a large information cascade. Celebrities in general have a much more larger influence on the popularity of a song than a person with less popularity. For instance, the song “Location”, by Khalid, had a 2690% increase in song plays after Kylie Jenner posted a Snapchat of the song. This unequal level of power distribution is more relevant to the “rich-get-richer phenomena.” Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat is more easily accessible to people who come across it, which is reason why the songs she reposts gets so much coverage.
I initially thought that songs went viral because of a large information cascade over people connected by weak ties, and that it occurred in a chain of equal people. However, it seems to me that popular users in a network have much more influence over a viral song, because they are responsible for a significant influence of the information on a network. Thus, the trick to going viral for artists seems to me is to find a very popular user on Snapchat or Twitter, and ask them to repost your song.
https://genius.com/a/how-kylie-jenners-snapchat-turns-songs-into-hits