Martha Michailidou’s research while affiliated with Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences and other places

This paper exhibits the results of the experiment that took place at Panteion University of Athens. For the operationalization purposes of the experiment, a web site was constructed that hosted 12 songs from unknown artists, while 196 students participated. The main research question is related to how we decide to consume or decline a cultural product, after getting information about the decisions of the previous participants. Namely, to what extent each successive actor complies with the group behavior after observing their preceding choices and possibly abandons his own private selection. In order to estimate whether this imitation tendency can cause mass consumption phenomena, we used the cross-sectional absolute deviation (Chang et al., 2000) which measures the existence of herding. The decisions of the previous participants in the first experimental group were presented as the impersonal choice of users and in the second as the preferences of the opinion leaders in a network of participants. According to the outcomes of the research the influence of the impersonal mass choice is stronger compared to that of the opinion leaders who failed to cause a phenomenon of high statistical value.

Information and communication technologies and the technologies of Web 2.0 have brought a revolution that acts as a prelude of creative destruction for the incumbents in most sectors of the economy. One of the most affected sectors is that of the music industry. After a brief discussion of the cultural industries and the significance of the music industry, the paper turns to theoretical approaches to Social Networks and their analysis, and especially the ways in which social influence has traditionally been conceptualised. It then offers an examination of Salganik and Watts' web-based experiments for the study of collective social dynamics in cultural markets, and proposes a new experimental design for the examination of the potentially novel forms of influence developing in the ecology of the Web 2.0.

Attempts of measuring musical diversity (Alexander, 1996; Anderson et. al, 1980; Dowd, 2004; Lopes, 1992; Peterson & Berger, 1975; Rothenbuhler & Dimmick, 1982) are currently being reevaluated, due to the renewed interest of international institutions, like UNESCO, which assert that diversity of cultural expressions is of vital importance for the promotion of social cohesion. Using the Greek market as a case study, this paper attempts to evaluate the diversity of Greek music production, applying already established indexes over data spanning the last decade (2000 -2010). Preliminary results suggest that after a long period of industry concentration which led to increased homogeneity of music production, diversity erupted over the last couple of years. This is commonly attributed to new entrants, leading to a paradoxical situation where the concentration of ownership coexists with the diversity of production. The paper attempts to interpret this seeming paradox within the specific parameters of the Greek case, and proposes further research on two fronts: first, the organizational practices of the Greek music industry and the way these shape decision-making regarding diversity of releases, and secondly, consumers’ conceptualizations of generic diversity and the way these shape music consumption.