“Why did the Beatles become a worldwide sensation? Why do some cultural products succeed and others fail? Why are some musicians, poets, and novelists, unsuccessful or unknown in their lifetimes, iconic figures decades or generation after their deaths? Why are success and failure so unpredictable?,” these are among the questions explored in Beatlemania, a draft paper by Harvard professor Cass Sunstein that will be published later this year in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Beatles Studies.
“On one view, the simplest and most general explanation is best, and it points to quality, appropriately measured: success is a result of quality, and the Beatles succeeded because of the sheer quality of their music,” wrote Sunstein. “On another view, social influences are critical: timely enthusiasm or timely indifference can make the difference for all, including the Beatles, leading extraordinary books, movies, and songs to fail even if they are indistinguishable in quality from those that succeed.”
In 1961 the Beatles were an obscure English rock band from Liverpool, with no manager and modest prospects. They tried to release a debut single, Love Me Do, but every record label they approached rejected them and the band came close to splitting. In January of 1962 Brian Epstein became their manager. Epstein had no experience in managing artists, but he liked their music and sense of humor. He eventually persuaded EMI producer George Martin to audition the band in June of 1962, who despite feeling that they were “a rather raw group” with “not very good songs,” agreed to sign them to a recording contract.
Love Me Do was released in the UK in October of 1962 and became a modest hit peaking at number 17. In 1963 the band released a series of number-one singles, including Please Please Me, From Me to You and She Loves You and their first album, Please, Please Me. Their popularity exploded to such a degree that the UK press started using the term Beatlemania to describe the adulation of their fans. In February of 1964, when the Beatles came to the US to appear in the Ed Sullivan TV show, they were international stars having achieved unprecedented levels of critical and commercial success.
What explains the Beatles’ spectacular success? According to Sunstein, “There is no question that the success of the Beatles, and the rise of Beatlemania, involved an informational cascade.” Information cascades occur when people make a decision based solely on the previous decision of others rather than on their own personal judgement.
“Informational cascades are often necessary for spectacular success,” adds Sunstein. Cascades work because people “rationally attend to the informational signals given by the statements and action of others; we amplify the volume of the very signals by which we have been influenced.” Informational cascades are often seen in financial markets, where they can lead to speculative behavior, excessive price moves and market bubbles. “Social movements of various kinds, including fads, fashions, and rebellions (bellbottoms, the rise of the Monkees, the Arab Spring, #MeToo, the attack on Critical Race Theory) can be understood as a product of cascade effects.”
Sunstein’s paper uses the Beatles and Beatlemania as a concrete case study to explore the impact of social influences and informational cascades on songs, TV shows, and other cultural works. “It is important to emphasize that economic models of informational cascades generally assume rational behavior. If one does not know whether a book, a movie, or a song is good, it might well be reasonable to rely on the views of others, at least if you trust them (or do not distrust them).” That’s what wisdom of the crowd is all about.
“An informational cascade might lead people to download songs, to start to read a book, or to go to a movie theater, but can it actually lead people to like songs, books, or movies?, asks Sunstein. “The best answer is no, but it is too simple. It is true that if people can tell that a song is terrible or dull, they will not enjoy it, even if they think that others have, and eventually, the song’s popularity will wane. In this sense, informational cascades can be fragile. But for songs or other cultural products that rise above a certain quality threshold, we cannot rule out the possibility that the reality or perception of widespread enthusiasm will lead to enduring success.”
In his paper, Sunstein cites a research study by Princeton sociologist Matthew Salganik and his collaborators that aimed to understand a seeming paradox. While hit songs, TV shows, and other cultural products are significantly more successful than the average, experts have a lot of trouble predicting which ones are likely to succeed. To investigate this paradox experimentally, the researchers created an artificial online music market which offered over 14,000 participants the opportunity to listen to 48 real but unknown songs by unknown bands.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Those in the independent group had no knowledge of the previous choices of others. While listening to a song, they were asked to assign a rating from one (hate it) to five (love it) stars, and they could download the song if they wished. This first group gave a clear sense of which songs people liked best.
Participants in the social influence group could also choose which songs to listen to, but in addition, they also saw how many times each song had been downloaded, and they were free to use or ignore this information in making their own decisions. Furthermore, participants in the social influence group were randomly assigned to one of eight independent sub-groups, and could only see the choices made by member of their own sub-group.
The results showed that if people saw that members of their subgroup had downloaded a song, they were very likely to download the song as well. The popularity of songs was different for each of the eight subgroups, because for each subgroup, almost any song could end up being a hit of a flop mostly based on which songs were initially downloaded. Everything depended on initial popularity. However, there was an exception to the power of social influence. The songs that received the highest ratings by the independent group rarely did very badly, and the lowest rated songs really did very well. That is, the truly superior songs, like those of the Beatles, would likely end up being successful simply because of their high quality.
To validate the results, Salganik and his collaborators conducted a second experiment with a different group of roughly 12,000 participants. In this experiment, they artificially inverted the actual download choices that the new participants were shown, so the previously most popular songs were now the least popular and the least popular were now the most popular. They found that some of the formerly unpopular songs rose to the top of the ranking while some of the popular ones sank, showing once more, that people pay a great deal of attention to what other people like. And, they once more found that the very best songs recovered their popularity in the long run. Salganik’s experiments show the importance of social influences and information cascades in the success or failures of songs and other cultural works.
“If Love Me Do had not been a hit, it is not entirely unfair to wonder whether the Beatles would have enjoyed anything like the spectacular success they had,” noted Sunstein. “History is only run once, so this proposition is difficult to prove. But whether and in what sense that success was a product of serendipity, or contingent on factors that are elusive and perhaps even lost to history, is essentially unanswerable.”
Initially, Love Me Do received mixed reviews, but the group’s enthusiastic Liverpool fan base and Brian Epstein’s relentless hard work turned the song into an unexpected hit, starting an informational cascade. George Martin, who was originally skeptic about the band, decided to record a debut studio album, Please, Please Me, with 14 songs, 8 of which were composed by Lennon-McCartney. The album was released in March of 1963 and soon reached number 1 in the UK where it stayed for an unprecedented 30 weeks. The rest is history.
“There are many paths to success, and perhaps the Beatles would have found one,” wrote Sunstein in conclusion. “[M]any of the serendipitous factors had nothing to do with social influences and informational cascades. Epstein’s involvement and enthusiasm might have been essential (we do not know), but it might be a stretch to see it as the functional equivalent of early downloads (how much of a stretch, though?) … Still, and crucially, a failure to obtain (sufficient) early popularity in 1961 almost doomed the Beatles. How close did it come? We do not know. In addition, something very much like a large number of early downloads for Love Me Do in 1963 made all the difference. Was it essential to the Beatles’ success? We do not know that either.”
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