Study Shows Songs Spread like Viruses

This is interesting! A study published on September 22, 2021 in the Royal Society uses models from epidemiology to track the spread of music. 

The researchers analyzed music downloading trends and examined the mechanisms that drive song popularity. There’s the belief that there are many similarities between the release of a new hit song and the outbreak of an infectious disease. 

When an infectious disease first enters a population, it is transmitted from person to person via social interactions. Prevalence eventually reaches a peak and then declines as the susceptible pool is exhausted and/or infectious individuals recover. 

After a new hit song is released, it also ‘spreads’ rapidly through a population, from person to person and through multiple media, eventually reaching some peak popularity and then diminishing in appeal. 

At the end of a disease epidemic, a large proportion of the population will have been infected with the disease, whereas at the end of a hit song’s period of extreme popularity, a large proportion of the population will recognize that song. 

The researchers study data from a large and detailed UK database of song downloads from 2007 to 2014, a period when downloading (as opposed to streaming) was a primary method of music consumption. Using mathematical tools usually applied to infection, the paper finds that popular songs do indeed spread like viruses. And certain genres are more "infectious" than others. 

According to the research, the most "infectious" genre was electronic, with a basic reproduction value (R0) of 3430. That is, in an entirely susceptible population, one person sharing electronic music (by "talking about the song, playing it, sharing it on social media or requesting it on the radio") could influence 3,430 others to download it. 

Supposedly, this makes it roughly 190 times more transmissible than measles, which has an R0 of about 18! It is suggested that the faster spread of preferences for Electronica songs reflect stronger connectivity of the impressionable community, compared with the larger and broader community that listens to more common genres. 

The next most "infectious" genres were rap and rock, and the least were dance and metal. Notably, most genres showed high variability in contagiousness. 

Lead author Dora Rosati concludes that both music and infectious diseases depend on social connections to spread through populations. 

Of course, many people now consume music via streaming services – and so, it’s unclear how the findings, which are based on download data, apply to music streaming. But with a different dataset, the same type of analysis could still be applied to streaming data, which might offer different information.