Comment by sacred_numbers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sacred_numbers | Hacker News Reader

Something to keep in mind: the top track in the world right now is ROCKSTAR, with about 5 million streams per day. The song lasts about 3 minutes, which means the song was streamed for 250k hours around the world. Spotify streams an average of 234 million hours per day, though, which means the number one song represents about 0.1% of the total. We have an unprecedented level of access to all sorts of different genres of music, so the number one song is barely relevant in determining this generation's taste in music. Consider this idea: if 99.9% of the population is listening to classical music, but are all listening to different pieces it's possible that none of the songs they are listening to would show up as number one, since there are many thousands of classical pieces. The number one song is determined by a small percentage of people (maybe even a fraction of a percent) that care about listening to whatever is most popular at the moment. The rest of the population just listens to music from any generation they like.

I heard this being refered to as the Muhammad Effect.

Tabloids love to write articles about most popular name for newborn kids in each country. And in countries with non-negligible Muslim minorities that name is often Muhammad (or some variation of it), because Muslims names have higher peak.

So there might be 50 times as much kids with non-Muslim names, but they have roughly even spread between names and don't show up in that statistic.

Then people freak out they are taken over by imigrants :)

Similarly, in the Western world, the most popular name seems to be some form of John.

Yes, though proportionally I think there are far more Mohammed's. Wikipedia says:

> It is thought to be the most popular name in the world, being given to an estimated 150 million men and boys.

One of my teammates recently gave birth to a boy, she talked a little about figuring out whether to name the kid Mohammed or not, with the major downside being that yeah, it's insanely common, especially among her nationality.

> with the major downside being that yeah, it's insanely common, especially among her nationality.

What's even the upside?

When people name their kids things like John or Mohammed, I just think of this comic: https://webcomicname.com/post/617835911135330304

From this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O2Yjn3OXRk

Actually it seems to have started as Yohanan, Yo coming from Yahweh (god in Hebrew), and hanan (gracious).

I like this. It's concise, and captures something I've been saying about pop statistics for a while.

Statistics are such a big part of information these days (eg covid), and the poor intuitions people have about statistics are getting to be impactful.

Interesting took me a bit to get what you were trying to say but of course it makes sense. Basically, 99% of people are listening to “anything besides ROCKSTAR”, it’s just that that “anything else” doesn’t overlap with too many others “anything else”

And very different from terrestrial radio where the top song was probably multiple percentage points of the total music airtime.

I've referred to this as hyperfragmentation, you see it everywhere. You can find your match on anything -- if you like green boots displayed in a slightly warm light under a palm tree, you can find other people who do.

The rise of the internet in the 90's gave us "long tail" access to increasingly personal choices, and people thought it was great. Now, it's ALL long tail.

I'm finding that even major movie studios have a hard time generating buzz and leveraging their assets to get a prominent spot in media. There are a lot of movies with A-list actors that are falling completely under the radar on release, only to show up on Netflix months later. It takes everything a studio or record label can do to push a release into the mainstream consciousness now, because we all have so many different ways we're ingesting culture now.

This is exactly the discussion that occurs every general election in the UK. ie First pass the post vs proportional representation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system

Interesting points, but I don't think the conclusion follows.

In your example, if the number one song is classical and made up 0.1% of listening time, would you conclude that classical music is not popular?

It's like saying water isn't a popular drink because only 0.1% of people buy water in the form of 20 fl oz Dasani bottles.

What I'm trying to say is that the number one song doesn't convey a lot of information. The genre of the number one song may be the most popular genre or one of the least popular genres; you can't know if you only look at the number one song. With your example, it could be possible that 0.1% of the population LOVES Beethoven's 5th symphony and exclusively plays it on repeat while the other 99.9% of the population hates classical music. Just to be clear, I'm not making any claims about what's popular or not, I'm just presenting an alternate hypothesis that would also result in the number one song not being representative of the overall population's preferences.

By definition, a popular thing will appeal to the lowest common denominator. I don't mean this in a derogatory way; not "to the average dumb person" but "to something we all share". I think as a consequence of that, popular music will be simple, easily consumable, have very little impact on an individual, and be easily forgotten / make room for the next one.

David Foster Wallace makes the same observation in his article "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," which I read in the excellent "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" collection of some of his essays.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com