The Network Diffusion behind “Mo Bamba”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/arts/music/sheck-wes-mo-bamba.html
It seems impossible. A single-take song with a simple beat and keyboard loop has recently reached the top of the Billboard Charts. The pretty explicit song, Mo Bamba, took all of 20 minutes to record and now has almost 200 million plays on Spotify and 41 million plays on Soundcloud. Many people have been wondering how Mo Bamba became so popular. The song’s success can be attributed to networks- more specifically, network diffusion.
A lot of the success has to do with people’s networks. When it was initially released, Mo Bamba was completely unknown. It grew in popularity very organically and very quickly from node to node. As the New York Times put it, “…uploaded without fanfare to the streaming service SoundCloud, it has grown, largely via word of mouth, from a regional internet curio to a surefire party-starter and tastemaker’s favorite”. When people heard it, they sent it to their friends who probably sent it to their friends, thus spreading the song through more networks and increasing its popularity. While this is one reason for Mo Bamba’s increasing popularity, network diffusion is another very big reason it has climbed to the top.
Network diffusion, as we learned in class, is how individuals’ choices can switch depending on what others do. When I first sent the song to my sister, she replied, “this is trash” (direct quote from text message). Many others said similar things: “It sounds out of tune”, “This song will never catch on”, “It makes no sense lyrically”. These quotes were all things I heard while Mo Bamba started gaining popularity. Just like with anything, there were people who disliked the song, but there were others who loved it. In class we looked at this as choice A or choice B. When the “mantra-like chants” (NYT) of Mo Bamba were heard at parties, many people would gather and yell the lyrics (or whatever they knew of them) with each other. Especially on college campuses, this factor definitely swayed people’s opinions on the song. The same individuals who initially had doubts about the song now love it and even ask for it to be played (including my sister, who consistently sang it throughout this Thanksgiving break). I’m not sure about the exact network diffusion process or the fraction of nodes needed to switch someone’s choice from dislike to like, but as I’ve seen through the past few months- this song is the perfect example of network diffusion.