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?这个基本难题一直吸引着心理学、社会学、人类学和营销学等许多领域的学者。文化产物如果能平衡熟悉和新颖之间的关系,更容易成为流行。然而,文化产品的新颖之处通常是多方面的。本文以歌曲为案例研究了其多方面的独特性以及与流行度的关系。我们首先分解歌曲新颖性或独特性的多个方面,然后衡量其对歌曲流行度的影响。我们采用一系列统计模型来研究歌曲流行度和其歌词、弦进行或音频属性所关联的新颖性之间的关系。在超过五万首歌曲的数据集上进行的分析发现,所有类型的歌曲新颖性与其流行度之间存在一致的负相关。总体而言,我们发现歌词的独特性与流行度之间的关系最为显著。然而,对于某种类型的歌曲,音频的独特性是流行度的最强预测因子。我们进一步发现,歌曲歌词的主题和重复性介导了歌曲流行度和新颖性之间的关系。总体而言,我们的结果与“最佳区别理论”(平衡新颖与熟悉之间的关系)相矛盾,呼吁对一个文化产品的独特性可能展现的多个维度进行调查。