Sanjeev Dewan
Professor of Information Systems
Paul Merage School of Business
University of California, Irvine
Friday, April 24, 2015
10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: 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 peer consumption information are salient for each song: total number of favorites by the community as a whole, and favoriting behavior 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 music consumption data from an online music community. Our analysis finds robust evidence of both popularity and proximity influence. Further, popularity influence is more important for narrow-appeal music as compared to broad-appeal music. Finally, the two types of influence are substitutes for one another, so that proximity influence, when available, dominates the effect of popularity influence. These findings have implications for design and marketing strategies for online communities, such as the one studied in this paper.