“iTunes shoppers are more likely to download a song if lots of other people have already added it to their digital collections, new research has found,” Simon Aughton reports for MacUser. “Sociologists Matthew Salganik and colleagues at Columbia University in New York, US, monitored 14,000 people as they visited website with 48 songs by relatively unknown bands and listened to songs, rated them and then decided whether to download them.”
“The researchers observed that those who were allowed to see how often a song had been downloaded were more likely to give a higher rating to songs that had been downloaded more often, and were more also more likely to download… You can take part in the ongoing survey at http://musiclab.columbia.edu in return for some free downloads,” Aughton reports.
Full article here.
From the Columbia University survey site:
Music Lab is a research project conducted by scientists from Columbia University to learn about how people form opinions about music. If you participate in Music Lab you will have a chance to download free new music.
After answering a few questions about yourself, you will be presented with a menu of songs by cool new artists. Your participation will take between 5 minutes and about two hours depending on how many songs you choose to listen to.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews reader “MacSmiley” for the link.]
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