http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?_r=3&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin In the April 15^th, 2007 New York Times Magazine, Duncan J. Watts discussed the idea that information cascades, or what he calls “the social influence condition,” affect which musicians become international successes and which remain completely unknown to the rest of the world. Watts, along with Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds, created an experiment using a website they created called Music Lab, where 14,000 participants registered to download songs. Participants listened to songs they had never heard before and then chose whether or not to download them. Some participants could only see the names of the songs and artists, while others were split into groups and could also see prior downloads of others in their group. The results of the experiment showed that the top songs varied greatly from group to group. A song’s rank in the independent group, which the researchers deemed “quality,” did not correlate to its rankings in the other groups, where users could see how often a song had been previously downloaded. Additionally, in the social-influence groups, the top songs were much more popular relative to other songs than were the top songs in the independent group. Though it seems reasonable to look at the The results of Watts’ experiment illustrate the concept of information cascades that we have been learning about in lecture. Certainly, the study sheds some light on the structure of the music industry today. Watts argues that celebrities in the music world are not popular because of an overwhelming consensus of opinion by consumers. Rather, he suggests that certain musicians rise to stardom on a somewhat random basis. In a parallel world, he argues, it is perfectly likely that someone like Britney Spears would be completely unknown and an artist completely unknown now would be the famous one. This demonstrates an application of the theory of information cascades from class. If an artist begins to sell albums, more and more people will continue to buy those albums because they are popular. Thus, marginal popularity informs potential fans that they should be interested in the artist, and support grows exponentially. Information Cascades also explain the presence in the music industry today of a few wildly successful artists who represent a very small percentage of all people trying to make a living in the music industry. As popularity only leads to more popularity, a few lucky musicians become more and more successful, gaining fans on the sole basis of their already established popularity. So, we end up with two extreme types of musicians—those who gained a little bit of popularity that snowballed into massive success and those who are unable to gain any future success as a result of their current lack of popularity.