Cumulative Advantage (Part One)

April 26, 2007, 4:45 pm; posted by
Filed under Articles, Steve  | 8 Comments

What’s the difference between U2 and The Virgin Prunes?

The most obvious difference is that you’ve heard of the first and not the second. And with good reason — U2 has sold over 170 million albums and won 22 Grammy Awards, while The Virgin Prunes . . . have not done either of those things. Their vast disparity in success necessarily suggests a vast disparity in talent, right? Of course!

Except maybe not.

The members all grew up together in Dublin. Dick Evans (Prunes guitarist) and The Edge (U2 guitarist) are brothers, and Dick was actually a member of U2 when they were “The Hype.” The other Prunes were all friends of Bono and the rest, in a society they called the Lypton Village, where they protested suburbia through performance art and an invented language. Neither band had particularly good musicians. Of one concert, the Edge remembered: “As appalling as we normally were, we were just indescribably bad, and the sound was atrocious . . . we were so hopelessly inconsistent.” He consistently identified his brother as a better guitarist.

Both bands played many of the same concerts and neither could get signed by a record label for several years. The Prunes’ style was far more avant-garde and punk, at a time when that was quite popular in Great Britain. So why did U2 become the world’s most famous musical group while the Prunes never made the big-time?

A recent article in the New York Times Magazine suggests it might not be what we think. Researchers set up an experiment where thousands of participants, split into eight groups, rated and downloaded songs by bands they had never heard. In one section, the participants would only see the name of the song and band; in the other, they could also see how often the songs had been downloaded. If the quality of a song truly determined its popularity, they reasoned, the same songs would be hits in both sections and all groups.

But they weren’t.

“Good” songs, defined as ones downloaded the most in the independent sections, did have a higher market share overall — but the result for each individual song widely varied. One song, ranked 26th out of 48 in quality, was #1 in one world, but #40 in another. There was little correlation between top-five quality and top-five popularity. The scientists concluded, “Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals . . . and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictability is inherent to the nature of the market.”

What people like isn’t just what they like — it’s what they think other people like.

It’s easy to come up with an explanation for why something happened after the fact, and it’s tempting to believe our successes are a function of our own peculiar gifts or skills. But in a world where The Virgin Prunes could have easily been U2, where actual ability and objective worth is less valuable than sheer luck-driven popularity, what control do we have, really?

To Be Continued…


Comments

8 Comments to “Cumulative Advantage (Part One)”

  1. MC-B on April 26th, 2007 10:50 pm

    The market works differently for hyper-successful groups than for others, especially in terms of works of art. The reasoning (at least in Economics 100) is that, if a person is going to download only one song (or read one book or see one movie), they’ll want to download the best one. The easiest way for someone to make these decisions is by asking someone else, because songs are hardly fungible goods. In a different market where goods are more fungible, this applies less.

  2. Steve on April 27th, 2007 12:38 am

    I’m not arguing this is a universal principle that covers laundry detergent and motorcycles, but I think it has applications outside the narrow range of music as well, which I will address shortly.

  3. Chloe on April 27th, 2007 7:29 am

    I really, truly hope this isn’t the case for the writing market. If it is, I’m in trouble…

  4. Aarong on April 27th, 2007 9:06 am

    Sorry Chloe. It is. Give it up now. Go work for a paper supply company. Much more fulfilling in the long run. The world doesn’t need any more Steinbecks or Hemingways or Salingers or Lewis’ or Chestertons or Hosseinis or Austens or Dumas’.

  5. MC-B on April 27th, 2007 11:07 am

    By the same token, I’m not claiming that it applies only to the narrow field of music. It also applies to writing, movies, and other works of art, as well as many different sports/atheletes, and in a number of other arenas.

  6. Steve on April 27th, 2007 11:17 am

    Yeah, I should have said ‘art’ in that comment.

  7. Dsweetgoober on April 27th, 2007 1:10 pm

    I’m interested in the returnability of fungible products. I have some moldy bread I’d like a refund on.

  8. Cumulative Advantage (Part Two) : Bweinh! on May 3rd, 2007 9:07 am

    […] Last week, I talked about the randomness inherent in artistic success, like U2 or Harry Potter. The cited experiment concluded that the quality of an artistic work has little to do with its popularity, because what people like “isn’t just what they like — it’s what they think other people like.” […]

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