The elusive quality of "buzz" is one of the most sought-after in the music
industry, though few insiders have ever perfected the formula for garnering
it. Simply put, buzz means a lot of people are talking about a band -- and
supporting it commercially by buying its albums and selling out its
concerts. But how does this excitement begin in the first place?The
Arctic Monkeys and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are two of indie rock's biggest
buzz bands. The former is a barely twentysomething quartet that formed in
Sheffield in 2003 and scored the fastest-selling debut in the history of the
British charts when it released "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm
Not" late last year. An English take on the Strokes' New Wave of New Wave
dance rock, the Arctic Monkeys have sold 550,000 records in England, and
they shipped 100,000 to the United States on Feb. 21.
Based in Brooklyn and named after a bit of evocative graffiti, Clap Your
Hands Say Yeah also attempts a modern update of New Wave-era sounds, closely
emulating the danceable art-rock of the late-'70s Talking Heads. The
quintet's self-titled debut was released in October, but as with the Arctic
Monkeys, the buzz had been building long before the album reached stores.
Both of these groups initially floated their home recordings for free on
the Internet, where the music was discovered by fans who told other fans,
and so on and so on, until the record companies noticed the interest and
engaged in spirited bidding wars. Because of these and other recent
examples, many in the music business are now convinced that the Net is the
ultimate weapon for creating buzz.
Of course, there's no way to prove that. Or is there?
A group of social scientists at New York's Columbia University recently
conducted an ambitious study to chart how buzz grows exponentially via
downloading, and their findings were published in the journal Science.
Setting up a simulated online music store stocked with 48 songs by unknown
bands, they recruited more than 14,000 teenagers and carefully tracked what
they downloaded. Half the group flew blind, choosing songs simply based on
what they liked. But half could see the number of previous downloads for
each track.
The sociologists found that in the second group, teens flocked to the
songs their peers already had singled out.
"You assumed that if other people liked it, you may like it, as well,"
said Dr. Duncan Watts, who conducted the study. "In the world where people
could see what other people liked, the popular songs became more popular,
and unpopular songs were less popular.
"You might think, 'Oh, the popular songs were more popular because
they're better, and everybody figures out who's good and that's who we want
to listen to.' But at the same time, it became more and more difficult to
predict which particular bands would be in that slot of most popular bands."
In other words, the scientists proved that oft-repeated music industry
saying that nobody really knows what makes a hit. But there was also a more
significant finding: The nice way to view it is that listeners' enthusiasm
is contagious. The other way, as Watts told me, is that "people are sheep"
-- and how else, really, to explain the multi-platinum success of Mariah
Carey?
"It's not just that people like certain kinds of songs and not others;
they like what other people like," Watts said. "If we look across the
different worlds that we created, we can see that there is a positive
relation between quality and success. The nutshell version of this is that
the very, very best songs never do terribly, and the very worst songs never
do really, really well. But anything else is possible: The best songs can
just do OK, and the worst songs can also do OK, and the OK songs can do
really, really well or really, really poorly."
It is now, therefore, a scientifically proven fact that there is no
accounting for taste.
As a scientist, Watts singles out the Artic Monkeys and Clap Your Hands
Say Yeah as excellent examples of downloading spurring more and more
downloading. As a critic, I'll note that while the debuts by both bands are
not without their charms, these are certainly disproportionate to the buzz.
In the end, the Columbia experiment proves that people herd behind other
people when choosing the music they buy, but it's still a crapshoot as to
whether that music will be any good. Thanks to the Web, more music is now
more readily available than at any time in history. But if I may be so bold,
we still need discerning critics to separate the wheat from the chaff, and
to steer us toward the music that's most deserving of our time.
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