Every artist has to start out small. Whether performing just
for family or middle school talent shows, a singer gradually gains experience
with dreams of making it big. It goes without saying that not everyone gets the
chance to perform at sold-out arenas or have countless number one hits, however
for the lucky few that get that opportunity, they must rise to the occasion and
swoop their listens off their feet.
It seems nearly impossible to think of our music industry
without showstoppers like Katy Perry. To pursue her dreams as an artist, Katy
dropped obtained her GED and moved to Nashville in hopes of becoming a star.
She recorded a commercially unsuccessful gospel album Katy Hudson, however as that didn’t pick up, she was dropped from
the record label. After moving back to California, Katy was dropped and picked
up from multiple record labels, proving just how hard it is to be successful in
this incredibly competitive field.
Eventually, Capitol Records took a leap of faith with Katy
and helped her find her niche in the industry. Producing “I Kissed a Girl” and
“Hot N Cold,” Katy finally hit her big break, which would launch her into
superstardom. Four albums selling 11 million copies and 81 million singles sold
worldwide, Katy aggressively shocked the world with her pop anthems. Performing
at the coveted Super Bowl Halftime Show and producing autobiographical
documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me,
Katy has made people of all age groups fall in love and support her
unconditionally.
But what if Katy never made it big? What if “I Kissed a
Girl” never peaked, never sold over four million copies in the United States
alone? Katy may have continued to produce unpopular music and so very few
people would have even known who she was. The idea alone is enough to question
if her music wasn’t successful like it is now, would people even think it’s
good?
We’ve fallen into a society that believes good music is the
music that is the most popular. Despite how we truly feel about a song, we tend
to be more likely to buy something, if it’s what everyone else is buying. This
being said, it is also possible that while being coerced to buy the popular
music, we also train ourselves to genuinely enjoy it.
In a recent study, researchers showed that people could
become victims to the self-fulfilling prophecy in regard to the music they
wanted to download (Salganik and Watts, 2008). The web-based experiment
provided the participants the opportunity to listen to, rate, and then download
a bunch of songs if they pleased. The experimenters had four groups: the first
showing the songs and the real number of downloads, the second had the songs
and the number of downloads inverted so that the highest amount of downloads
was placed next to the least popular song, the third also showed inverted
number such that the number of downloads was switched between the 47th
and 2nd song, the 46th with the 3rd song and
so on, and the fourth groups showed the songs and no number of downloads. The
results showed that the songs that were displayed to have the highest number of
downloads in the beginning actually produced the most amount of downloads by
the participants. The self-fulfilling prophecy highlighted that the correlation
of appeal to the music and its popularity seemed to diminish throughout the
study.
Though Katy’s tremendous success has proven her music to
entice millions of people, we are left wondering what if she never made it big?
Different types of music appeal to different people, yet for the majority of
people the reality is that we are directed to music that is popular and thus
teach ourselves to enjoy it.
Jenny Baudhuin
Salganik, M. J., & Watts, D. J. (2008). Leading
the herd astray: An experimental study of self-fulfilling prophecies in an
artificial cultural market. Social Psychology Quarterly, 71(4),
338-355. doi:10.1177/019027250807100404
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