Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation
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Last annotated on September 8, 2016
Rihanna's label assembled a dream team of songwriters, producers, vocal coaches, and song mixers at a cost of about $78,000 per song. However, this considerable figure was dwarfed by the million dollars it cost to promote a song, about a third of which went to radio promotion.Read more at location 147
record labels feel it is worth spending in excess of $300,000 to get a song played on the radio. Or perhaps it is better to note that radio airplay is still this valuable,Read more at location 149
Taken together, these stories illustrate how FM radio remains an important part of American popular culture even as it competes for listeners with new media.Read more at location 151
American over the age of 12 listens to the radio for about 15 hours a week, with the vast majority of this listening being to radio stations that play music.Read more at location 153
The goal of this book is to understand how songs get on the radio.Read more at location 156
a better understanding of radio provides a basis for speculating about media that will follow it.Read more at location 160
study popular culture not from the perspective of what it means, but how it was made.Read more at location 163
This book's substantive concern of how songs become hits on the radio is part of a more general class of problems in social science known as the diffusion of innovation.Read more at location 168
farmers in Iowa planting a new kind of corn • firms in heavy industry adopting various new production technologies • small-town doctors prescribing the antibiotic tetracycline • postwar households purchasing such appliances as televisions and washing machinesRead more at location 171
At the most basic level, one can study diffusion simply by drawing a graph and looking at its shape to see whether it is more concave or more s-shaped.Read more at location 179
Contagious diffusion can only occur when someone who has experienced the innovation encounters someone who has not. Diffusion is slow early on because there are too few adopters who can promote the innovationRead more at location 211
So you may be more likely to buy a book when it becomes a best seller because the book's popularity gives it more conspicuous placement in bookstores, even if you don't personally know a single individual who has read the book or have even observed strangers reading the book in public.Read more at location 223
Thus, we have two distinct patterns for how an innovation might diffuse across a population. In the second style, the proportion of holdouts who adopt in each period is determined by how many actors are already using the innovation.Read more at location 225
In contrast, in the first style a constant proportion of holdouts adopt in every period.Read more at location 228
For instance, the diffusion of tetracycline was mostly exogenous, the diffusion of hybrid corn almost perfectly endogenous, and the diffusion of postwar consumer appliances a compromise between the two patterns.Read more at location 231
I emphasize the question of the nature of diffusion itself and focus on the question of under what circumstances songs follow the concave curve and under which circumstances they follow the s-curve.Read more at location 234
Paul Hirsch's (1972) article in the American Journal of Sociology, “Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems.Read more at location 243
Hirsch saw popular culture as a flow process where cultural objects move downstream from the pool of original artists through cultural distributors and surrogate consumers before reaching the ultimate consumers. Cultural distributors are firms like record labels and book publishers that provide artists with the financing, technical collaborators, retail distribution networks, and other resources to produce their art and get it to market. Surrogate consumers are such actors as radio stations and book reviewers who do not produce art but draw attention to it.Read more at location 245
Peterson and Berger's (1975) American Sociological Review article “Cycles in Symbol Production: The Case of Popular Music” explained the displacement of show tunes by rock and roll in the mid-1950s as being catalyzed by legal and technological shocks that disrupted the ability of cultural distributors (Tin Pan Alley) to co-opt surrogate consumers (radio and film musicals).Read more at location 258
through the wonders of electronic reproduction the total volume of fame does not diminish, but grows. That is, at each stage there are fewer successful artists, but those who are successful are so famous that the aggregate of fame increases as one moves downstream.Read more at location 262
massive inequality nicknamed the “superstar effect” which is made possible by the introduction of electronic reproduction.Read more at location 264
Chapter 2 shows that the number of stations that have played a pop song follows a pattern consistent with all of the radio stations reacting to something outside of their peer group. This implies a puzzle that if radio stations are not imitating one another, from whom exactly are they taking their cues?Read more at location 283
Chapter 3 argues that this centralizing coordination comes from the promotional efforts of record labels, as seen in extreme form with payola.Read more at location 287
Chapter 4 applies the “opinion leaders” hypothesis to radio—a field that has its own folk version of the theory.Read more at location 293
Chapter 5 presents a case history of the Dixie Chicks radio boycott.Read more at location 299
Chapter 6 discusses the implications of the long-term trend for radio to be segmented into ever narrower formats as a special case of the general issue of art classification systems.Read more at location 303
Finally, the conclusion to the book discusses the long-term relative decline and recent absolute decline of radio as a medium and the rise of the media that are replacing it. In order to extrapolate lessons to these emerging media,Read more at location 308
The central empirical concern of this book is how songs become popular on the radio, so a good place to start is by case study of a particularly successful song. In figure 2.1, I have graphed the diffusion curve for “Umbrella” by Rihanna.Read more at location 318
The song spread explosively and then slowed thereafter. As many stations started playing the song in its first three weeks as did so over the next year.Read more at location 322
this concave growth pattern is consistent with an exogenous process and is entirely inconsistent with the s-shaped curves produced by an endogenous process. It is completely implausible to argue that radio stations decided to play this song because they were imitating each other, as its popularity simply happened too fast for stations to be attentive to each other.Read more at location 324
That we do not see an s-curve but rather a concave curve implies that this song did not spread across radio as an endogenous process of the kind so beloved by sociologists, popular science writers, and “viral marketing” consultants.Read more at location 329
in general, pop songs have concave curves with the same shape that we see for “Umbrella,”Read more at location 332
To explain how so many radio stations came to play “Umbrella,” we cannot resort to arguments about contagion or cascades.Read more at location 333
may be a trait of the song itself or it may be some actor who is influencing all of the radio stations.Read more at location 336
The first is that stations have unsated demand for new music from pop stars and play songs as soon as they are available.Read more at location 340
The second is that the large companies who have dominated radio since deregulation coordinate the airplay of their properties.Read more at location 340
We might imagine that when a beloved artist releases new music, radio stations would immediately jump at the chance to play it.Read more at location 343
There are two problems with this interpretation. First, unsated demand sounds plausible for explaining the diffusion of songs by established stars, but we would not imagine that radio stations were eagerly awaiting releases by hitherto unknown performers.Read more at location 346
contrary to the predictions of the unsated demand hypothesis, songs by unknown artists tend to diffuse by an exogenous pattern, though not as steeply or as widely as those by stars.Read more at location 349
A more severe problem for the unsated demand explanation is that it cannot explain why multiple songs from the same album become popular at different times.Read more at location 350
radio stations had available to them 11 more songs, all of which critics thought had the potential to be hits and three of which ultimately achieved this status. Despite this abundance of new material available from a hot young star, radio stations showed remarkable conformity in choosing which songs to add to playlists first. With few exceptions, radio stations began playing “Umbrella” in March, “Shut Up and Drive” in June, “Hate That I Love You” in late summer, and “Don't Stop the Music” within a few weeks of Christmas.Read more at location 358
consistent with an exogenous diffusion process beginning at the respective dates.Read more at location 362
If the reason that radio stations tend to start playing a song all at once was that they all gained access to it at the same time, this supposition fails to explain why most radio stations sat on “Hate That I Love You” and “Don't Stop the Music” for weeks or months after the songs became available and then suddenly began playing them during a very short time window.Read more at location 374
Since the simple fact of songs being made available to radio stations is not enough to explain the tremendous conformity of radio stations, we must look for an actor who coordinates radio. Who is it who decides which song is going to spread?Read more at location 378
many people have a strong idea as to exactly who is the central actor who coordinates radio: Clear Channel Communications.7 The San Antonio-based company owns about one in ten of all commercial American radio stationsRead more at location 381
imagine that Clear Channel did not have any local programmers at all. Rather, in this counterfactual, a programmer at corporate headquarters in San Antonio creates a single playlist for all of the company's stations.12 This playlist would then either be e-mailed to local disk jockeys or, better yet, there would be no local disk jockeys and the broadcasts would be piped in from a central recording studio 24 hours a day via syndication or voice tracking. In this scenario, all Clear Channel stations would have identical content and therefore would show the same adoption behavior, adding any given song on exactly the same day.13 If we imagine the diffusion curve just for Clear Channel stations, in this scenario it would not be a curve at all but a step function,Read more at location 406
To test this hypothesis, I plotted “Umbrella” again in figure 2.5, but this time with a separate curve for each company with an appreciable number of Top 40 stations. As can be seen, the companies each show the same smooth exogenous diffusion curve. This result contrasts strikingly with what we would expect were decisions made at the chain level.Read more at location 423
curves are essentially identical with only trivial and probably random discrepancies between the adoption times of stations in different chains.Read more at location 427
we can rule out the possibility of strong coordination at the chain levelRead more at location 429
perhaps there is chain influence but it is subtle enough so as to not be apparent by eyeballing one song at a time, but still substantial in the aggregate.Read more at location 435
a radio chain might have a chief programmer at the corporate level who creates projections, conducts audience surveys, analyzes sales data, and simply provides informed aesthetic judgments and then shares all of this valuable insight with programmers working at the various stations in his or her chain. This information would not be used automatically but interpreted and applied slightly differently by each station in the company. In other words, we might imagine that corporate would not send out orders, but provide advice.Read more at location 439
However, because each company would provide different information to its stations at a different time than would rival chains, we would still expect each of these chain-specific curves to be offset from each other.Read more at location 443
several programmers reported regular conference calls between corporate sister stations in which they shared information and ideas on programming decisions. Such a tendency for stations to especially form intracorporate social networks might lead to clustering of their programming.Read more at location 448
the extent to which sister stations especially cluster their add times is no greater than what we would expect by chance.Read more at location 475
we have seen that pop songs usually spread among radio stations in a way that is inconsistent with the stations imitating one another but is consistent with some central force influencing all of the stations. Because the same pattern applies to later singles on an album, the pattern cannot be explained by album release dates. Likewise, popular speculation attributes conformity among radio stations to corporate ownership, but we have strong evidence that corporate radio chains do not centrally coordinate the decision to add songs to radio playlists.Read more at location 476
which leaves open the question of what is causing radio stations to so tightly coordinate their behavior?Read more at location 483
