Success and Failure in Cultural Markets

Success and Failure in Cultural Markets project was motivated by a
puzzling aspect of contemporary cultural markets: successful cultural
products, such as hit songs , bestselling books, and blockbuster movies,
are orders of magnitude more successful than average; yet which particular
songs, books, and movies will become the next "big thing"
appears impossible to predict. The project proposed that both of these
features, which appear to be contradictory at the collective level, can
arise from the process of social influence at the individual level. To
explore this possibility empirically a website was constructed where
participants could listen to, rate, and download new music. Using a
"multiple worlds" experimental design, the project found support
for the ideas in a series of four experiments involving a total of 27,267
participants. Data Release Included in this release are 167 data files
containing the experimental results, mp3 files from the 48 songs, and the
data documentation. The data files are in the ascii text, comma separated
values(csv) format. These data files are to reproduce, and hopefully
expand upon, the analysis conducted in the dissertation project by Matthew
J. Salganik, supervised by Duncan J. Watts. The experiments were conducted
at the Department of Sociology at Columbia University between 2004 and
2007. Please direct any questions to Prof. Matthew Salganik.