Strong tie, weak tie, and the strength of K-Pop fandom
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilyblake1/2018/04/04/k-pop-numbers/#6deb225e48ab
In this article, Emily Blake, a music data journalist and charts manager at Pandora, analyzes why K-Pop boy bands are becoming the top social artists. Blake takes K-Pop boy band BTS who won the Top Social Artist Award at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards as an example, and claims that K-Pop boy bands are rising stars in social media not because they have more followers than other artists, but because comparing to fans of other artists, their followers mention their idol much more frequently.
In fact, the fanbases of many K-Pop boy bands outperform other fanbases in terms of promoting their idols in social media. If we consider a fan following an artist in social media as having an edge between the artist and the fan in the social media network, then the edges between K-Pop boy bands and their fans should probably be considered as strong ties. Moreover, as K-Pop boy bands being mentioned so often in social media by their fans, eventually some users who have little knowledge about K-Pop previously may get curious about why these boy bands are popular and decide to look them up. As these users learn more about these bands, there is a chance that these users become interested and weak ties start forming between them and the artists. As mentioned in class, weak ties have surprising strengths in joining hard-to-reach parts of a networks. Therefore, the users who just start following K-Pop boy bands may introduce these boy bands to their friends who have rarely heard of them before. In this way, more users of the social media get exposed to the K-Pop boy bands, more edges between the boy bands and the users may form, and fanbases of these bands have a large potential to grow even larger.
In addition, in the class we didn’t get to mention the strength of strong ties that much. This article suggests that the stronger a tie between node A and B is, the more likely edges will form between node A’s other friends and node B.