The Fickle Crowd: Reinforcement and Contradiction of Quality Evaluations in Cultural Markets

We clarify conditions under which two seemingly contradictory yet widely observed tendencies occur in cultural markets where amateur connoisseurs evaluate products—reinforcement of previous consensus and contradiction of that same consensus. We start from prior work’s insight that achieving “distinction” requires that evaluators display tastes demonstrating higher skills of discernment and standards that are acknowledged as legitimate by others. Based on this, we argue that evaluators reinforce prior evaluations of products to demonstrate that they share the same quality standards as their peers, but they selectively contradict prior evaluations by downgrading widely acclaimed products, because doing the latter makes the evaluator appear to have even more sophisticated tastes than their peers. We test this account using 1.66 million reviews from an online platform where amateur connoisseurs publicly evaluate beers. Our analyses support an endogenous model explaining why and when evaluators may contradict existing evaluations even though a group plausibly sharing the same quality standards may have established such evaluations in the first place.

Cultural Divergence in popular music: the increasing diversity of music consumption on Spotify across countries

The digitization of music has changed how we consume, produce, and distribute music. In this paper, we explore the effects of digitization and streaming on the globalization of popular music. While some argue that digitization has led to more diverse cultural markets, others consider that the increasing accessibility to international music would result in a globalized market where a few artists garner all the attention. We tackle this debate by looking at how cross-country diversity in music charts has evolved over 4 years in 39 countries. We analyze two large-scale datasets from Spotify, the most popular streaming platform at the moment, and iTunes, one of the pioneers in digital music distribution. Our analysis reveals an upward trend in music consumption diversity that started in 2017 and spans across platforms. There are now significantly more songs, artists, and record labels populating the top charts than just a few years ago, making national charts more diverse from a global perspective. Furthermore, this process started at the peaks of countries’ charts, where diversity increased at a faster pace than at their bases. We characterize these changes as a process of Cultural Divergence, in which countries are increasingly distinct in terms of the music populating their music charts.

Cultural Divergence in popular music: the increasing diversity of music consumption on Spotify across countries

The digitization of music has changed how we consume, produce, and distribute music. In this paper, we explore the effects of digitization and streaming on the globalization of popular music. While some argue that digitization has led to more diverse cultural markets, others consider that the increasing accessibility to international music would result in a globalized market where a few artists garner all the attention. We tackle this debate by looking at how cross-country diversity in music charts has evolved over 7 years in 51 countries. We analyze two large-scale datasets from Spotify, the most popular streaming platform at the moment, and Itunes, one of the pioneers in digital music distribution. Our analysis reveals an upward trend in music consumption diversity that started in 2017 and spans across platforms. There are now significantly more songs, artists, and record labels populating the top charts than just a few years ago, making national charts increasingly different from one another. Furthermore, this process started at the peaks of countries' charts, where diversity increased at a faster pace than at their bases.

High-Status Affiliations and the Success of Entrants: New Bands and the Market for Live Music Performances, 2000–2012

Network affiliations have been extensively investigated as a way for new entrants to establish a foothold in markets. A commonly invoked mechanism is that of signaling, whereby affiliations provide exposure and improve a newcomer's odds of success. Our paper highlights a second mechanism that we argue is especially relevant in cultural markets: how a new entrant's perceived distinctiveness varies based on its affiliations. Leveraging data on music concerts, interviews of musicians, and biographical and genre information from archival sources, we investigate the effects of early affiliations for 1,385 bands formed between 2000 and 2005. In particular, we consider whether a new band benefits from appearing with a high-status act. If the main value is signaling, then a newcomer would be better off opening for high status bands, because doing so maximizes both legitimacy and exposure. However, in such conditions entrants run the risk of not being allocated enough attention, and thus not being seen as sufficiently distinctive. While the literature typically emphasizes the positive role of signaling, we find that our results more strongly support the notion of distinctiveness: new bands that frequently appeared with high-status artists made less money and were more likely to subsequently dissolve. This suggests that social network approaches to cultural markets need to better incorporate how network position affects a newcomer's opportunity to be recognized as distinctive.

The rise of domestic popular film production with new audience and changing industry structure: The case of popular cinema in Turkey

Transformation of cultural markets is a complex development that relates to both the audience and the industry. During the last decade, domestic popular films in Turkey increased their share of box office significantly. This study analyses socio-economic developments along with monopolization of exhibition sector to understand the change. While factors such as higher income level, relatively lower ticket prices, higher proportion of population in education and urbanization created a new potential audience for domestic films, rise of a dominant player in exhibition sector broke the hegemony created by foreign distribution companies.

Stay True to Your Roots? Category Distance, Hierarchy, and the Performance of New Entrants in the Music Industry

New entrants in established markets face competing recommendations over whether it is better to establish their legitimacy by conforming to type or to differentiate themselves from incumbents by proposing novel contributions. This dilemma is particularly acute in cultural markets in which demand for novelty and attention to legitimacy are both high. We draw upon research in organizational theory and entrepreneurship to hypothesize the effects of pursuing narrow or broad appeals on the performance of new entrants in the music industry. We propose that the sales of novel products vary with the distance perceived between the classes being combined and that this happens, in part, because combinations that appear to span great distances encourage consumers to adopt superordinate rather than subordinate classes (e.g., to classify and evaluate something as a “song” rather than a “country song”). Using a sample of 144 artists introduced to the public via the U.S. television program The Voice, we find evidence of a U-shaped relationship between category distance and consumer response. Specifically, consumers reward new entrants who pursue either familiarity (i.e., nonspanning) or distinctive combinations (i.e., combine distant genres) but reject efforts that try to balance both goals. An experimental test validates that manipulating the perceived distance an artist spans influences individual evaluations of product quality and the hierarchy of categorization. Together these results provide initial evidence that distant combinations are more likely to be classified using a superordinate category, mitigating the potential confusion and legitimacy-based penalties that affect middle-distance combinations.

Trabalhadores da cultura

This work unveils the composition, the structure, the expansions, the tensions, asymmetries, fights and ways of political-professional recognization of workers' culture in Brazil, having as specificity, the musical language considered independent. The cultural work, the artistic creation activities and the technical and technologic process associated to it are in the center of the capitalism transformation in the last times, whose ambiguities integrate the new global chains of specialized symbolic services and the transnational industries. Behind the expansion of the global cultural markets, there is the creation of symbolic-economic value propitiated through the art and culture´s fieldwork. Looking at the professional category of art, through a work's parameter contributes to reveal the reality of an area that has not been studied that much: of the self-management artist. It is about not only considering the artistic activities as profession, but as paradigmatic expression of the current market. Analyzing the specifications that allows to draw the independent musician's morphology, collaborates for the theorical debate of the artistic work and the public cultural politics, in its fundamental articulations.

An Experimental Study of Recommendation Algorithms for Tailored Health Communication

Recommendation algorithms are widely used in online cultural markets to provide personalized suggestions for products like books and movies. At the heart of the commercial success of recommendation algorithms is their ability to make an accurate prediction of a target person’s preferences for previously unseen items. Can these algorithms also be used to predict which health messages an individual will evaluate favorably, and thereby provide effective tailored communication to the person? Although there is evidence that message tailoring enhances persuasion, little research has examined the effectiveness of recommendation algorithms for tailored health interventions aimed at promoting behavior change. We developed a message tailoring algorithm to select smoking-related public service announcements (PSAs) for smokers, and experimentally test its effectiveness in predicting a target smoker’s evaluations of PSAs and encouraging smoking cessation. The tailoring algorithm was constructed using multiple levels of data on smokers’ PSA rating history, individual differences, content features of the PSAs, and other smokers’ PSA ratings. We conducted a longitudinal online experiment to examine its efficacy in comparison to two non-tailored methods: “best in show” (choosing messages most preferred by other smokers) and “off the shelf” (random selection from eligible ads). The results showed that the tailoring algorithm produced more accurate predictions of smokers’ message evaluations than the simple-average method used for the “best in show” approach. Smokers who viewed PSAs recommended by the tailoring algorithm were more likely than those receiving a random set to evaluate the PSAs favorably and quit smoking. There was no significant difference between the “best in show” and “off the shelf” methods in message assessment and quitting behavior.

Performing aesthetic confidence: how contemporary art collectors maintain status

In cultural markets, where value is highly uncertain, intermediaries and consumers select products by using status signals, including public metrics and informal recommendations. However, certain intermediaries and consumers risk their statuses and access to informal recommendations if they appear to rely on these status signals. Drawing upon the case of contemporary art collectors in New York City, I reveal that collectors work to maintain their statuses while utilizing status signals through performances of ‘aesthetic confidence’. In these performances, they claim a willingness to choose artworks based on their independent and good taste. Collectors flexibly cite multiple and sometimes opposing qualities of their purchases and interactions as evidence of aesthetic confidence. Higher status collectors reinforce status hierarchies through their privileged access to resources for displaying aesthetic confidence and their policing of lower status collectors’ claims. Performances of aesthetic confidence are both influenced by status and necessary for displaying status.