She’s So Popular

There is some interesting research by Duncan Watts which seems to show that popular songs are popular because they are popular. He ran some experiments which showed that when people rank songs, the dominant effect is other people’s rankings. Thus even a small recommendation for a song by a couple of people can translate into massive popularity, as more and more people copy and spread the recommendation. When he ran several experiments with the same songs, in some runs one song would be the most popular, in others it would be near the bottom.

I think this is plausible for short-term effects like the current top 40 charts, or a book bestseller list. I would like to think that for longer term effects, like a song which is still played twenty years later, there must be some basic quality there. Although there is really no reason to believe that there weren’t other twenty-year old songs of equivalent quality which are no longer played.

People still read Alexandre Dumas, but if he wrote today his books would probably be bestsellers which were forgotten five years later. Do we still read Dumas for historical interest, because he was perhaps the first author of popular bestsellers? Or is there some deep quality there which is hard for me to see? Or did he just catch on randomly long ago, and has held on ever since?