In an attempt to measure how social media affects the music biz (a different take than the constant attempts to just shut down the Interwebs), NYU Stern Professor Vasant Dhar looked at how the number of blog items about an album posted before its release could predict its sales. Looking at 108 albums released in early 2007, he found that it worked out pretty well.
With more than 40 "legitimate" blog posts prior to the album's drop, the artist could expect three times as many sales as the average. If that album was associated with a major label, the artist could expect five times as many sales. So, you know, there go the hopes of tastemakers everywhere looking for the next indie band out of Omaha.
But--but!--if the album saw 250 blog posts, it was likely to sell six times as many records regardless of the label. So like Billy Corgan said, "Hipsters Unite!" Just don't do it on Myspace. The number of friends an artist has are significant contributors to sales, but nothing compared to the number of blogs posts.
With a focus on numbers instead of trendsetters, Dhar seems to be bucking the trend of looking for that one hep DJ or party kid who can propel a band to the top. He limits his study to blogs that have "some authority" based on Technorati rankings, but it's still a far cry from the influentials of the tipping point.
While many marketers look at Malcom Gladwell's tome as the magic bullet for success (find the tastemakers with six degrees to everyone and sell them your product), Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist at Yahoo, didn't buy it. He released 48 songs from unknown bands to 14,000 people segmented in to groups that were assigned to pick songs on personal preference or based on what other people thought.
Word of mouth took over, but almost at random, with almost no correlation between the songs picked on merit and those selected by group taste.
"You cannot predict in advance whether a band gets this huge cascade of popularity, because the social network is liable to throw up almost any result," Watts told Clive Thompson for Fast Company. Also, the social networks might start to overshadow the music.
Or, as Dhar saw in his study, numbers count for more than authority.
"We analyzed the usefulness of blogs and social networks, as well as reviews in consumer, online media, and mainstream media, in predicting album sales in the four weeks before and after the album’s release date," he wrote in the conclusion. "We found that the most significant variable is blog chatter or the volume of blog posts on an album, with higher numbers of posts corresponding to higher sales."
Hear that music industry? I may have awful taste, but I still have a blog. I expect the checks to start rolling in.
[Fast Company Article, PR for Dhar study; Dhar's full paper]
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