Time spent on New Songs: Word-of-Mouth and Price Effects on Teenager Consumption

Noemi Berlin, Anna Bernard, Guillaume Furst

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The stardom system characterizes creative industries: the demand and
revenues are concentrated on a few bestselling books, movies or music. In this
paper, we study the demand structure between bestsellers and new artists’ productions in the music industry. We set up an experiment where participants face real choice’s situations. We create three treatments to isolate the effect of information and incentives on diversity. In a first treatment, music is consumed for free without information. In a second one, subjects receive a prior information on others’ evaluation of songs to study the effect of word-of-mouth. Finally, in a third one, a real market is introduced and music is bought. Significant evidence shows that word-of-mouth lowers diversity, while price incentives tend to lift it. In both treatments, subjects also react to the information or incentives nature.
Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Cultural Economics
Early online date14 Oct 2014
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Oct 2014

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Experimental economics
  • cultural goods
  • music industry
  • stardom system

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