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Social complex contagion in music listenership: A natural experiment with 1.3 million participants
Author(s)
Date Issued
2020-05
Date Available
2022-01-12T13:04:41Z
Abstract
Can live music events generate complex contagion in music streaming? This paper finds evidence in the affirmative—but only for the most popular artists. We generate a novel dataset from a music tracking website to analyse the listenership history of 1.3 million users over a two-month time horizon. We show that attending a music artist's live concert increases that artist's listenership among the attendees of the concert by approximately 1 song per day per attendee (p-value < 0.001). Moreover, this effect is contagious and can spread to users who did not attend the event. However, whether or not contagion occurs depends on the type of artist. We only observe contagious increases in listenership for popular artists (∼0.06 more daily plays per friend of an attendee [p < 0.001]), while the effect is absent for emerging stars. The contagion effect size increases monotonically with the number of friends who have attended the live event.
Other Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Alan Turing Institute
Type of Material
Journal Article
Publisher
Elsevier
Journal
Social Networks
Volume
61
Start Page
144
End Page
152
Copyright (Published Version)
2019 Elsevier
Language
English
Status of Item
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0378-8733
This item is made available under a Creative Commons License
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