Social Complex Contagion in Music Listenership: A Natural Experiment with 1.3 Million Participants

Can live music events generate complex contagion in music streaming? This paper finds evidence in the affirmative, but only for the most popular artists. We generate a novel dataset from Last.fm, a music tracking website, to analyse the listenership history of 1.3 million users over a two-month time horizon. We use daily play counts along with event attendance data to run a regression discontinuity analysis in order to show the causal impact of concert attendance on music listenership among attendees and their friends network. First, we show that attending a music artist's live concert increases that artist's listenership among the attendees of the concert by approximately 1 song per day per attendee (p-value<0.001). Moreover, we show that this effect is contagious and can spread to users who did not attend the event. However, the extent of contagion depends on the type of artist. We only observe contagious increases in listenership for well-established, popular artists (.06 more daily plays per friend of an attendee [p<0.001]), while the effect is absent for emerging stars. We also show that the contagion effect size increases monotonically with the number of friends who have attended the live event.

[1]  Ravi Bapna,et al.  Do Your Online Friends Make You Pay? A Randomized Field Experiment on Peer Influence in Online Social Networks - Online E-Companion Appendix , 2014, Manag. Sci..

[2]  Jason M. Fletcher,et al.  Is Obesity Contagious? Social Networks vs. Environmental Factors in the Obesity Epidemic , 2008, Journal of Health Economics.

[3]  S. Assmann,et al.  Subgroup analysis and other (mis)uses of baseline data in clinical trials , 2000, The Lancet.

[4]  Jason M. Fletcher,et al.  Detecting implausible social network effects in acne, height, and headaches: longitudinal analysis , 2008, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[5]  Juan D. Montoro-Pons,et al.  Live and prerecorded popular music consumption , 2011 .

[6]  Damon Centola,et al.  The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment , 2010, Science.

[7]  Marko A. Rodriguez,et al.  A Grateful Dead analysis: The Relationship between Concert and Listening Behavior Analysis , 2009, First Monday.

[8]  Eric D. Kolaczyk,et al.  Statistical Analysis of Network Data , 2009 .

[9]  Jure Leskovec,et al.  The dynamics of viral marketing , 2005, EC '06.

[10]  Christopher Small.  Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening , 1999 .

[11]  J. Hahn,et al.  IDENTIFICATION AND ESTIMATION OF TREATMENT EFFECTS WITH A REGRESSION-DISCONTINUITY DESIGN , 2001 .

[12]  Matthew J. Salganik,et al.  Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market , 2006, Science.

[13]  Jon Kleinberg,et al.  Differences in the mechanics of information diffusion across topics: idioms, political hashtags, and complex contagion on twitter , 2011, WWW.

[14]  Cameron Marlow,et al.  A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization , 2012, Nature.

[15]  Jürgen Pfeffer,et al.  Identifying Platform Effects in Social Media Data , 2016, ICWSM.

[16]  Matthew J. Salganik,et al.  Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market , 2008, Social psychology quarterly.

[17]  Stan J. Liebowitz,et al.  Will Mp3 Downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? The Evidence so Far , 2003 .

[18]  Andrew M. Ledbetter,et al.  TUNES THAT BIND? , 2009 .

[19]  Donald S. Passman,et al.  All you need to know about the music business , 1991 .

[20]  Piotr Sapiezynski,et al.  Evidence of complex contagion of information in social media: An experiment using Twitter bots , 2017, PloS one.

[21]  Edoardo M. Airoldi,et al.  Model-assisted design of experiments in the presence of network-correlated outcomes , 2015, Biometrika.

[22]  Stan J. Liebowitz,et al.  Will Mp3 Downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? The Evidence so Far , 2003 .

[23]  Dean Eckles,et al.  Social influence and political mobilization: Further evidence from a randomized experiment in the 2012 U.S. presidential election , 2017, PloS one.

[24]  Betsy Sinclair,et al.  Estimating the Causal Effects of Social Interaction with Endogenous Networks , 2012, Political Analysis.

[25]  Matias D. Cattaneo,et al.  Randomization Inference in the Regression Discontinuity Design: An Application to Party Advantages in the U.S. Senate , 2015 .

[26]  Margaret J. Daniels,et al.  Does the music matter? Motivations for attending a music festival , 2005 .

[27]  Peter E. Earl.  Simon's travel theorem and the demand for live music , 2001 .

[28]  Mark A. Fox,et al.  Concert Tour Success in North America: An Examination of the Top 100 Tours from 1997 to 2005 , 2007 .

[29]  Jean-Philippe Charron,et al.  Music Audiences 3.0: Concert-Goers’ Psychological Motivations at the Dawn of Virtual Reality , 2017, Front. Psychol..

[30]  Nick Crossley,et al.  Music Worlds and Internal Goods: The Role of Convention , 2015 .

[31]  Nick Crossley,et al.  Mapping the musical universe: A blockmodel of UK music festivals, 2011–2013 , 2016 .

[32]  I. Patterson,et al.  Rethinking Music Festivals as a Staged Event: Gaining Insights from Understanding Visitor Motivations and the Experiences They Seek , 2010 .

[33]  Arnt Maasø,et al.  Music Streaming, Festivals, and the Eventization of Music , 2018 .

[34]  Daniel E. Ho,et al.  Randomization Inference with Natural Experiments: An Analysis of Ballot Effects in the 2003 California Recall Election , 2004 .

[35]  Sinan Aral,et al.  Exercise contagion in a global social network , 2017, Nature Communications.

[36]  Kerstin Bischoff,et al.  We love rock 'n' roll: analyzing and predicting friendship links in Last.fm , 2012, WebSci '12.

[37]  A. Krueger.  The Economics of Real Superstars: The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World , 2005, Journal of Labor Economics.

[38]  Noah Mark,et al.  Birds of a Feather Sing Together , 1998 .

[39]  Noah Mark,et al.  Culture and Competition: Homophily and distancing Explanations for Cultural Niches , 2003, American Sociological Review.

[40]  Marie-Andree Somers,et al.  A Practical Guide to Regression Discontinuity , 2012 .

[41]  Justus Haucap,et al.  On File Sharing With Indirect Network Effects Between Concert Ticket Sales and Music Recordings , 2012 .

[42]  Nick Crossley,et al.  Social Spaces of Music: Introduction , 2015 .

[43]  Henriette Cramer,et al.  Global music streaming data reveal diurnal and seasonal patterns of affective preference , 2019, Nature Human Behaviour.

[44]  Richard Florida,et al.  Music Scenes to Music Clusters: The Economic Geography of Music in the US, 1970–2000 , 2010 .