Artistic success takes a mysterious mix of talent, luck and timing. But could algorithms now predict and produce the hits?
Justin was in a reflective mood. On 4 February 2018, in the living room of his home in Memphis, Tennessee, he sat watching the Super Bowl, eating M&Ms. Earlier that week, he’d celebrated his 37th birthday, and now – as had become an annual tradition – he was brooding over what his life had become....MORE
He knew he should be grateful, really. He had a perfectly comfortable life. A stable nine-to-five office job, a roof over his head and a family who loved him. But he’d always wanted something more. Growing up, he’d always believed he was destined for fame and fortune.
So how had he ended up being so… normal? ‘It was that boyband,’ he thought to himself. The one he’d joined at 14. ‘If we’d been a hit, everything would have been different.’ But, for whatever reason, the band was a flop. Success had never quite happened for poor old Justin Timberlake.
Despondent, he opened another beer and imagined what might have been. On the screen, the Super Bowl commercials came to an end. Music started up for the big half-time show. And in a parallel universe – virtually identical to this one in all but one detail – another 37-year-old Justin Timberlake from Memphis took the stage.
Why is the real Justin Timberlake so successful? And why did the other Justin Timberlake fail? Some people might argue that pop-star Justin’s success is deserved: his natural talent, his good looks, his dancing abilities and the artistic merit of his music made fame inevitable. But others might think that the stars are just the ones who got lucky.
There’s no way to know without building a series of identical parallel worlds, releasing Timberlake into each, and watching all the incarnations evolve. This was the idea behind an experiment conducted by the sociologists Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts in 2006 that created a series of digital worlds. The researchers built their own online music player, like a very crude version of Spotify, and filtered off visitors into a series of eight parallel musical websites, each identically seeded with the same 48 songs by undiscovered artists.
In what became known as the Music Lab, a total of 14,341 music fans were invited to log on to the player, listen to clips of each track, rate the songs, and download the music they liked best. Just as on the real Spotify, visitors could see at a glance what music other people in their ‘world’ were listening to. Alongside the artist name and song title, participants saw a running total of how many times the track had already been downloaded within their world. All the counters started off at zero, and over time, as the numbers changed, the most popular songs in each of the eight parallel charts gradually became clear.
Meanwhile, to get some natural measure of the true popularity of the records, the team also built a control world, where visitors’ choices couldn’t be influenced by others. There, the songs would appear in a random order on the page – either in a grid or in a list – but the download statistics were shielded from view.
The results were intriguing. All the worlds agreed that some songs were clear duds. Other songs were stand-out winners: they ended up being popular in every world, even the one where visitors couldn’t see the number of downloads. But in between sure-fire hits and absolute bombs, the artists could experience pretty much any level of success.
Take 52metro, a punk band from Milwaukee, whose song Lockdown was wildly popular in one world, where it finished up at the very top of the chart, and yet completely bombed in another world, ranking 40th out of 48 tracks. Exactly the same song, up against exactly the same list of other songs; it was just that, in this particular world, 52metro never caught on. Success, sometimes, was a matter of luck. Although the path to the top wasn’t set in stone, the researchers found that visitors were much more likely to download tracks they knew were liked by others. If a middling song got to the top of the charts early on by chance, its popularity could snowball. More downloads led to more downloads. Perceived popularity became real popularity, so that eventual success was just randomness magnified over time.
There was a reason for these results. It’s a phenomenon known to psychologists as social proof. Whenever we haven’t got enough information to make decisions for ourselves, we have a habit of copying the behaviour of those around us. The more platforms we use to see what’s popular – bestseller lists, Amazon rankings, Rotten Tomatoes scores, Spotify charts – the bigger the impact that social proof will have. The effect is amplified further when there are millions of options being hurled at us, plus marketing, celebrity, media hype and critical acclaim all demanding your attention.
All this means that sometimes terrible music can make it to the top. That’s not just me being cynical. It seems that the music industry itself is fully aware of this fact.....
