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Abstract
Information and communication technologies and the technologies of Web 2.0 have brought a revolution that acts as a prelude of creative destruction for the incumbents in most sectors of the economy. One of the most affected sectors is that of the music industry. After a brief discussion of the cultural industries and the significance of the music industry, the paper turns to theoretical approaches to Social Networks and their analysis, and especially the ways in which social influence has traditionally been conceptualised. It then offers an examination of Salganik and Watts' web-based experiments for the study of collective social dynamics in cultural markets, and proposes a new experimental design for the examination of the potentially novel forms of influence developing in the ecology of the Web 2.0.
Notes
For a recent review on the continuing battle of the music industry against forms of distribution and consumption resulting from peer-to-peer practices, see Cammaerts Citation(2011).
We have to note however that recent studies have shown that consumers are not keen on admitting failure to discern quality in products or services (see Nakayama et al., Citation2010).
The last decade has seen the development of a rich literature within the fields of cultural sociology, media and cultural studies and production studies, investigating whether the notion of cultural intermediaries originally put forward by Bourdieu Citation(1984) retains its original explanatory power (Nixon & Du Gay, Citation2002; Maguire & Matthews, Citation2010), the function of cultural intermediaries within various sectors of the cultural industries (see Negus, Citation2002, on the music industry and Wright, Citation2005, on publishing), and, more recently, discussing the ways in which the expansion of cultural industries together with the abundance of cultural goods brought about by the new forms of distribution and consequent cultural networks may be destabilizing the power of traditional cultural intermediaries (Wright, Citation2011).
According to the Nielsen Company, global consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year, when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years. (Nielsen Wire, Citation2010).
For an extensive review of the notion of homophily, see McPherson et al. Citation(2001).
To this end, Bakshy et al. Citation(2011), turn to the investigation of the diffusion rate of Twitter microblogging posts, arguing that that word-of-mouth information spreads via many small cascades, mostly triggered by ordinary individuals and not highly visible public figures like media representatives, celebrities, and government officials.
‘The outcomes of the interpersonal exchanges are provision of, and/or access to, consumption-related information that holds some “informational value” over and above the formal advertising messages provided by the company and that holds influence over the individual's decision making’ (Brown et al., Citation2007, p. 4).