VIRTUAL SEMINAR - ZOOM MEETING LINK
Link: https://umich.zoom.us/j/99929959678
Passcode: csaaw

Abstract:
What makes a song popular? This fundamental puzzle has intrigued scholars in fields as diverse as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. It has been theorized that songs (or other cultural products) that balance familiarity and novelty are more likely to become popular. However, a song's novelty is typically multifaceted. In this paper, 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 acoustic 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 lyrical uniqueness to have the most significant association with its popularity. However, acoustic 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 novelty and familiarity) and call for an investigation into the multiple dimensions along which a cultural product's uniqueness could manifest.

Speaker bio:
Yulin Yu is a 2nd year PhD student in School of Information at University of Michigan, advised by Daniel Romero. Her research interest is broadly in computational social science and information diffusion. Specifically, she applies data science methods including causal inference, network analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, and experiments to study what drives the popularity of people (e.g artists, scientists) and cultural artifacts (e.g music, vlog, social media posts). She is very interested in understanding these topics in global and cross-cultural perspectives.