How does our society appreciate the uniqueness of cultural products? This fundamental puzzle has intrigued scholars in many fields, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, and marketing. It has been theorized that cultural products that balance familiarity and novelty are more likely to become popular. However, a cultural product's novelty is typically multifaceted. This paper uses songs as a case study to study the multiple facets of uniqueness and their relationship with success. We first unpack the multiple facets of a song's novelty or uniqueness and, next, measure its impact on a song's popularity. We employ a series of statistical models to study the relationship between a song's popularity and novelty associated with its lyrics, chord progressions, or audio properties. Our analyses performed on a dataset of over fifty thousand songs find a consistently negative association between all types of song novelty and popularity. Overall we found a song's lyrics uniqueness to have the most significant association with its popularity. However, audio uniqueness was the strongest predictor of a song's popularity, conditional on the song's genre. We further found the theme and repetitiveness of a song's lyrics to mediate the relationship between the song's popularity and novelty. Broadly, our results contradict the ''optimal distinctiveness theory'' (balance between novelty and familiarity) and call for an investigation into the multiple dimensions along which a cultural product's uniqueness could manifest.
翻译:我们的社会如何欣赏文化产品的独特性?这个根本性的谜题让学者们在很多领域,包括心理学、社会学、人类学和营销领域都感到了兴趣。它的理论是,在熟悉和新颖性之间保持平衡的文化产品更可能受到欢迎。然而,文化产品的新颖性通常是多方面的。本文使用歌曲作为案例研究,研究独特性及其成功关系的多个方面。我们首先解开歌曲的新颖性或独特性的许多方面,然后衡量歌曲受欢迎程度的影响。我们使用一系列统计模型研究歌曲受欢迎程度和与其歌词、和弦进化或音频特性相关的新颖性之间的关系。我们对五万多首歌数据集的分析发现,各种歌曲的新颖性和受欢迎性之间始终存在着负面联系。我们发现一首歌曲的独特性与新颖的媒体关系之间,一个主题和重复性,这是我们歌曲和新颖的流行性审校正之间的一个主题和典型的审校正。