Testing for Tastes in Music Lab

About three years ago, I enthusiastically acquired a copy of Duncan Watts' book, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. I commenced its reading with enthusiasm and admittedly learned a lot about the science of networks and network theory in general. Fascinating as the discovery of fat tailed curves and clusters, together with the illustrations of the Bacon numbers game, I failed to see the immediate policy applications of this very carefully presented and indubitably innovative work.

Duncan Watts, an accomplished physicist and now professor of Sociology at the University of Columbia has used the internet to conduct informative experiments such as the Small world experiment whose results were presented in his first two publications. Writing in this New York Times Magazine article, he describes the results of the other experiment in which he and professional colleagues try to untangle how tastes in music are formed. It is now apparent that contrary to my initial thinking, network theory and the science of small worlds has a potentially large number of applications in commerce and perhaps in policy too.

However the most critical insight is that commercially successful cultural products could result from a confluence of forces and could not have been predicted. All commentary about why a certain product is successful is more likely a reflection of being clever after the fact. He still proves that good quality music certainly stands out but gains momentum because of the fact that it has been acquired by others.

This article leads me to regret the fact that I was not too keen while reading Six Degrees and that I did not take the early opportunity to participate in the Music Lab project. To my mind, its most profound implications are for professionals who market products. They ought to go figure!