Wonderful article in the New York Times today about a study that was done online regarding music preferences done with, and without, social influences. Paul Kedrosky says that it largely recapitulates the Matthew effect, wherein “the rich get richer, while the poor get poorer”, while Mat Ingram says that it echoes the Digg effect, but I think that there’s one particular paragraph that deserves special attention.

In our artificial market, therefore, social influence played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality. It’s a simple result to state, but it has a surprisingly deep consequence. Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictably is inherent to the nature of the market. It cannot be eliminated either by accumulating more information — about people or songs — or by developing fancier prediction algorithms, any more than you can repeatedly roll sixes no matter how carefully you try to throw the die.

[emphasis mine]

What does this mean? Only that early adopters have a great deal of influence on the selection of things that eventually explode and get “mainstream”. And as these researchers have shown, it could be that they have just as much influence as the intrinsic quality of that thing itself.

That is, things that get popular are not just popular because they are intrinsically good; rather, there is an equal chance that they get popular because some early adopters believe them to be good.

Like Mat Ingram posits, we can see this in social systems like Digg, where a certain few can influence many. And this creates a situation where, as Paul Kedrosky mentions, the phenomena of cumulative advantage can create improbable hits once these “hits” start gaining traction.

In fact, networked systems like the blogosphere and social networks can’t help but accelerate this phenomenon of cumulative advantage, particularly in genres of tastes which use or are influenced by the ‘net.

Which, I think makes the potential blogs all the more interesting and worthwhile, wouldn’t you say? :)