Popularity or Proximity: Characterizing the Nature of Social Influence in an Online Music Community

Abstract

We study social influence in an online music community. In this community, users can listen to and “favorite” (or like) songs and follow the favoriting behavior of their social network friends—and the community as a whole. From an individual user’s perspective, two types of information on peer consumption are salient for each song: total number of favorites by the community as a whole and favoriting by their social network friends. Correspondingly, we study two types of social influence: popularity influence, driven by the total number of favorites from the community as a whole, and proximity influence, due to the favoriting behavior of immediate social network friends. Our quasi-experimental research design applies a variety of empirical methods to highly granular data from an online music community. Our analysis finds robust evidence of both popularity and proximity influence. Furthermore, popularity influence is more important for narrow-appeal music compared to broad-appeal music. Finally, the two types of influence are substitutes for one another, and proximity influence, when available, dominates the effect of popularity influence. We discuss implications for design and marketing strategies for online communities, such as the one studied in this paper.

Assimilate or Differentiate? Contributors’ Choice of Subjects in User‐Generated Content

“…Second, while most of the literature suggests a positive friend effect in contribution decisions (e.g., Bapna & Umyarov, 2015;Zhang et al, 2015;Dewan et al, 2017;Qiu et al, 2018), we do not find a positive effect of friend content when it comes to subject choice decisions, except when the amount of existing content is the same among subject choices. In other words, the effect of friend content in subject choice decisions differs significantly from that in contribution decisions.…”

“…Friend content may induce users to contribute to the same subject as their friends, that is, assimilation. This could happen because online friends tend to copy each other's behavior and share similar beliefs (Bapna & Umyarov, 2015;Zhang et al, 2015;Dewan et al, 2017;Qiu et al, 2018). On the other hand, friend content may lead to differentiation because content contributed by friends is more likely to be redundant; contributors may want to contribute to different subjects to feel distinct (Brewer, 1991;Zeng & Wei, 2013).…”

Are social bots a real threat? An agent-based model of the spiral of silence to analyse the impact of manipulative actors in social networks

“…Many online interactions are shaped by social influence exerted by peers in social networks (Matook, Brown, & Rolf, 2015). Accordingly, social media have become important in the public's acquisition of information and the formation of consumer opinion (Dewan, Ho, & Ramaprasad, 2017;Fan & Lederman, 2018). However, it is often difficult to determine whether a piece of information or opinion on social media is authentic.…”

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“…Researchers of various disciplines have contributed through a wealth of studies to better understand the social influence that occur as a result of people's interactions in SNS, including information systems (Alarifi et al 2015;Sedera et al 2017), marketing (Dholakia et al 2004;Sedera et al 2017), organizational environment (Arvidsson and Holmström 2013) and political science (Tufekci and Wilson 2012). Moreover, the impact of SNS has been discussed in various sectors, including automobile (Wang et al 2015), music (Dewan et al 2017), and film industry (Oh et al 2017).…”