The Power Law and the Music Industry
This research paper investigates the processes that allows one to gain fame in the music industry. The paper argues that popularity in the music industry follows the power law. It starts with a more historical example of the BBC prom which is a list of all the Promenade concerts since 1895. He displays this on a graph with a logarithmic scale where the y axis represents the proportion of composers with at least the number of performances on the x axis. As the performers gained more popularity, they performed more, thus widening the gap between the less popular composers who performed less and making it less probable that they will perform as much as the popular composers.
In class we discussed the idea of power law and the concept of the “rich get richer.” This is a concept in which people tend to follow earlier decisions. The paper demonstrates this concept through a model with song listeners. The paper explains how if a song is popular in one week, it is more likely to be popular in the following week because more people will want to listen to it based on the number of downloads and listens. This idea follows the power law and “rich get richer” concept we learned about in class.
https://emusicology.org/article/view/7003/5601