November 7, 2009

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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 emprically 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.

To access these datasets please login or register as a user of the data archive.