Following the Herd?

A post on The Ministry of Information questions the methodology of a US experiment that seems to show that people's choices of music is based more on peer pressure than anything else.

Sociologist Matthew Salganik, who conducted the survey, said that success was not relative to the quality of the music.

"It also suggests that even if an act creates high quality music, you might not be successful," he said.

Doing my best Ron Edwards impersonation, I could say that artists like Marillion or Porcupine Tree are objectively better than Coldplay or Franz Ferdinand, despite the much higher sales of the latter bands. But this is only true for a given value of 'better'. I maintain that Porcupine Tree give a vastly better listening experience than any of the more popular four chord bands provided you're prepared to invest the effort to get under the skin of the music. I suspect the legions of people who lap up the formulaic Coldplay albums can't be bothered to do that; they just want the musical equivalent of a kebab

And there are always going to be those who blindly follow the hype, and miss out on some good stuff as a result. Their loss.