Correlations between Grateful Dead Fan Concert and Online Behavior
First Monday, a peer-reviewed Internet journal run by the University of Illinois at Chicago recently published an article entitled A Grateful Dead Analysis: The Relationship Between Concert and Listening Behavior which I found interesting.
Frequent readers will know that I've always believed the Grateful Dead provided a roadmap -- twenty years in advance -- for how the music industry should respond to the digitization of media, by changing business model emphasis from album sales to road touring, community building, and branded concessions. In fact, you could easily argue that the roadmap goes beyond music into publishing and information industries in general.
You might remember this post (Krugman on the Grateful Dead as a Business Model) where I reported with delight that Princeton's Paul Krugman thought the same thing.
The First Monday article, however, isn't about business models. Instead, it's more of a study in community, comparing live concert vs. online listening behavior. Specifically, they took data from 1,590 live set lets across as 23 year period and compared it to 2.6M listening events from 2005 to 2007 on last.fm.
Excerpt:
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A fun excerpt from the middle:
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This is no surprise to Dead fans. I think many of Bobby's songs -- particularly the testosterone-filled ones -- were viewed as a chance to give Jerry's voice a break. I like when the data draws easily supported empirical conclusions.
Excerpt from the conclusion:
This article presented an analysis comparing the popularity of Grateful Dead songs as identified by both how many times they were played in concert and how many times they were listened to by members of the last.fm online music service. The results presented here indicate a strong, but not perfect, correlation between concert plays and fan listens. These results suggest that the music choices of its online community of listeners reflect very well the live concert tradition of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, even after their dissolution.
The complete article is here. Related articles by Zemanta
