Popworld mag goes down the dumper

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Only 9,000 sales out of a print run of 130,000. Ouch.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6571291.stm

Comments

[koganbot]

Tom, you might be interested in this NY Times piece that Dave linked over on Cure For Bedbugs. Has a really interesting analysis of why consumer markets will always be unpredictable: You generally only get very well-known if you're slightly well-known first, and what gets you slightly well-known is idiosyncratic and somewhat random.

Of course, this doesn't explain the Popworld train wreck, given that you had something that was known. And bad writing (I assume ms_bracken is OTM here), would explain why it bombs in its second, third, or tenth week, but not why it crashes coming out of the gate.

If you're not signed up for NY Times they might not let you in - that isn't predictable either - but registering is free. However, in a few more days this piece will go over to Times Select, and that's something you'd have to pay for. If you have trouble accessing the piece, I'll email it to you. The piece is written by Duncan Watts, one of the men who conducted the original study; I'd read a number of news accounts (two or three or four) of the study when it originally came out last year in Science - I think one of you linked the Guardian coverage from poptimists - and (1) not one of the accounts gave a comprehensible account of Watts' procedures (which Watts was able to do in a couple of sentences) and (2) not a single one mentioned the point that Watts' considered most significant: that the fact that we influence each others' taste makes popularity somewhat random and hard to predict. The accounts stalled on the idea that listeners are influenced by other people rather than just by "quality" - if I recall correctly, the Guardian dope was using it to "explain" why Ashlee gets better sales than McCartney, not realizing that the piece applies to all popularity, Beatles and Beethoven as well. (No one's saying that "quality" has nothing to do with success, but rather that people pay attention to what other people are paying attention to, so popularity tends to clump around certain items. This applies as much to The Test Of Time as it does to new product.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'd need to re-read it again to actually understand the experiment they did (though I've read about it before).

Another current hot theory in research - which goes against this I guess - is "predictive markets", the idea that a large enough sample is a good predictor of things, but an even BETTER predictor when the sample is itself acting as a predictor, i.e. "What will you like?" gets you an OK result, but "What do you think other people will like?" gets you even better ones, and even BETTER better ones if there's something 'at stake' i.e. if you present it as a game.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

ie the LEAGUE OF POP