While I never really thought about it before, after completing
the readings for today’s class, I realized how many trends are driven by the
rich-get-richer effect. The readings discussed how this phenomenon can be seen
in the population growths of cities and the spread of blogs, but one example I
couldn’t help but focus on was the way music moves through our society.
There are thousands, upon thousands of garage bands coming
out with new music every day, and with the technology available to us today, it
is pretty easy to produce a half decent album. While most of these bands will
never reach acclaim outside of their hometown, a few of them are smart enough
to utilize their social networks and get their music to a wider audience. While
another band might be much more talented, the one the gives their demo to the
girlfriend of the drummer whose dad went to college with a guy who now works at
a radio station is much more likely to get their song on the radio.
If they manage to get the demo into the right hands and the
DJ at the station likes the song, he is going to play it more, meaning more
people are going to hear the song and like it. From there, those people will
download the music and tell their friends about this great new band, and they
will tell their friends, and before you know it, that mediocre, small town
garage band is headlining a show at The Garden. While you may be one of those
people to say “Oh, I knew about that band way before anyone else did”, odds
are, that band was stuck in the long-tail of a power-law trend for quite a
while before they started to accumulate momentum and break into the mainstream
music scene. And it is all because of that first DJ that played the song and
unintentionally affected the opinions of all of his listeners that this band
was able to make it big.
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