Twilight Of The Suit System

This popped up in a tweet by @lefsetz:

Quantifying how blog posts affect music sales

The study, Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales, done with student Elaine Chang, found that a flurry of “legitimate” blog posts influenced sales threefold.

When blog posts hit 240, sales went up six times on average, regardless of whether an album was released by a major or independent label.

“It is possible for an album to overcome the disadvantage of being released by an independent label,” the study reported. “In fact, albums with such extreme highs in chatter correspond to sales even higher than major label, high-chatter albums.”

Under that 240 benchmark, high blog chatter will translate into more sales, although they’ll still be relatively low if the album is released by an indie label.

I wonder why “legitimate” is in quotes and what is meant by that?

Here is the bullet to the head of the Suits:

“We were surprised at the importance of it. We expected that the views of the traditional media would count more. But in some cases, blogs were more important than media ratings. Basically, what that suggested is that when it comes to music, people tend to trust people with views similar to them more than (they do) the experts. People who are looking at the world in the same way as you (do) are becoming increasingly important.“

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Which is why Twitter has become so popular. Which is why Word-Of-Mouth works.

Previously here:

Why We’re Not Biting — And You Do!