David is joined by Dr Adrian North to discuss how music affects our everyday behaviours and how new technology could shape musical tastes and consumer behaviours in the future.
Thanks to technology, we can now access many kinds of music at any time, and carefully curate not just our playlist but our very identities. How is this instant availability changing the way we consume music, and how is music technology shaping our lives?
Dr Adrian North heads the School of Psychology at Curtin University and researches the social and applied psychology of music. His research concerns music and well-being in both specific and the general populations, in areas such as using digital music in everyday life to improve mood; the impact of music on consumer behaviour and theories behind musical preference and taste.
In this episode, Dr Adrian North answers these questions and more, delving into streaming services, taste-setters, why music recommendation algorithms are so inaccurate, and how musical trends can predict stock market turbulence, gross national product and even a recession.
North’s research:
Related articles:
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au.
Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of the University.
Music: OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library
You can read the full transcript for the episode here.
David: This is The Future Of where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better. I'm David Blaney.
Thanks to technology, we can now access all kinds of music all the time and carefully curate not just our playlist but very identities. How is this instant availability changing the way we consume music, and how can this technology change still to make music more immediate? To discuss the future of this topic further with me today is Dr Adrian North who heads the School of Psychology at Curtin University and researches the social and applied psychology of music. Thank you very much for coming in today, Adrian.
Dr Adrian North: You're welcome.
David: Spotify, title, Apple music, Amazon music, YouTube, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Digital radio, streaming, live shows. Have we reached a Zenith of music availability? Have we peaked?
Dr Adrian North: I don't know if we've peaked. I mean there's very little scope for it to go much further simply because at the moment there's approximately 50 million tracks available online, so I mean obviously that that will continue to grow over time. I think the crucial thing is I don't see it disappearing anytime soon and it's, it's, it's a very exciting time to be involved in music research because particularly our relationship with music has completely changed as a consequence of, of, of this technological innovation. So if you think, you know, historically we used to possess in a position whereby music was arranged by a hierarchy. You had a composer who would pass the music to an orchestra who would play to the audience or you had a culture which would pass the music to say a street musician who in turn would play to an audience that's completely changed with particularly streaming services. Whereas now we have access to 40 50 60 million pieces of music on demand almost anywhere in the world or anywhere with a decent phone signal at least. And so as a consequence, what we're starting to see is people using music. And so as people use music more and more in their daily life to achieve particular goals, that of course creates a market for people to start pumping music into that, that massive audience base that's now building.
David: And it's become almost like the sort of unofficial soundtrack to your life. I can listen to a song while on that. Well not at the gym, but well look at me. No. While I'm out running or while I'm commuting, I can, I can pick song that songs which which match what I'm doing.
Dr Adrian North: Absolutely. I did some research quite a long time ago now at the very, very beginning of the, of the streaming era. And what we did there was we just pinged people up a text message to their phone, you know, it almost literally random times throughout the day off from you of 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM and just, you know, one of the questions and it was, can you hear music? And I think it was from memory, I think it was 34% of the time, but we pinged people at random, they could hear music. So in other words, you know, a third of your life seems to have some sort of musical accompaniment, which is an astonishing figure.
David: Does this this instant gratification of being able to pick and choose what we want to listen to rather than having a ton or having someone at a radio or whatever, tell us what to listen to this. Does this have psychological benefits for us?
Dr Adrian North: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, crucially, what it does, it gives much greater opportunity for people to explore and to test themselves. So making [inaudible], I'm in my late forties now and you know, I remember when I was a kid, if I was born in the UK, you know, if I got five pounds for Christmas, I would, you know, I'd run to the shop and buy an album, which was a huge investment. You know. Whereas these days, if you're, particularly if you've got a streaming service, what that means is essentially you can try something out and if it's not for you, just press skip, move on. It hasn't effectively cost you anything. There's no marginal cost of trying something out. So, although I'm not aware of any hard evidence on it at the moment, certainly this current business model that the industry is using really does incentivise people to to try to discover music. Now that's also, it's got a very much a downside too, because of course if you've got access to somewhere between 40 and 60 million tracks, then you've got the challenge of, well, what do I listen to? You know, again, going back to my childhood days, if you've only got 10 or 20 albums in your collection, it's pretty easy to decide what you're going to pick from. You know, it's not a difficult choice. Whereas if you've suddenly got to pick from between 40 or 60 million tracks, it's actually very difficult to find something amongst all that. And so the next challenge that this industry faces is all around the recommendation algorithm that that's turning into a huge issue for them. Because if people can't find music they want, then they say, why should I keep paying for access to all these tracks when I'm not listening to them?
David: And of course the, the algorithm has become the, well it's the, the selector of what we listened to. Do you think we're losing the sort of tastemakers that we that we had on radio for example?
Dr Adrian North: I don't think we are necessarily are, I mean the, the, there's a strong argument if you look at, you know, the more kind of business that is, that you're on this literature on this, which talks about how when you get these kind of markets where it's very difficult to find the particular thing, you know, the particular instance that you want to purchase or you want to consume, you actually have to increasingly rely on tastemakers. I think the other side of that is one as I think that the streaming industry itself is clearly wise to this. So, you know, across all the services you're seeing this increasing reliance on, you know, you know, items on your home screen about know what your friends are listening to, what the tastemakers are listening to and, and, and, and so on. And I think, you know, they're becoming increasingly attuned to this as well and trying to tap into that model as well. I mean, again it's another coincidence I'm sure that within the, the really big streaming services, they actually set up effectively radio stations within them that precisely do try to model that older one .Exactly. Yeah. And then you're quite quite plainly trying to harp back there to, you know, the 1950 60 70 is where you would have the tastemaker DJ who would say, Hey everyone listen to this. So for you know, the market that wants that kind of approach, they're they're starting to cover that off. And then you've got the algorithm ideally.
David: Daily mix on Spotify?
Dr Adrian North: Exactly. Although my, my personal criticism of that is, is when you look at the kind of stuff they recommend, it's still not terrifically well tailored. And this is really where my research starts.
David: In what sense?
Dr Adrian North: Well in that of course, you know, there's all kinds of variables that we know perfectly well that drive musical taste. And of course to some of, you know, to some extent that the streaming services tap into that. So for example, Spotify does a very good job of, of trying to tap into location-based, you know, playlists and so on, like yeah, for parties exercising and, and, and so on. But there's also a whole range of other variables that influence musical tastes that certainly can be built into those with relative ease and which you don't really see that much yourself at the moment, which yeah, I suspect it's coming.
David: And you mentioned you were doing some research in this area.
Dr Adrian North: Yeah, absolutely. So what we've been looking at is looking at how personality predicts musical taste. And it does, and again, that that's a relatively simple thing that you can build into these kinds of mechanisms. You can also infer personality from somebody who's music listening. So conceptually, at least it's possible for a streaming service to basically say, okay, if you'd like to give us access to your listening history, then what we can do is on that basis we can infer your personality. And on that basis we can start to recommend all kinds of other types of music to you because one of the faults that they currently have, the streaming services is that if you listen to artist 'A' or composer 'A', then in your recommendation algorithm, what it'll spit out to you next time is other music that also sounds like artist 'A' or composer 'A'. It doesn't allow for the fact that if you listen to say, some jazz, three days later you may want to listen to some classical music or you may want to listen to some funk or to whatever else and the the current recommendation algorithms, because they're so focused on the musical properties, they don't allow for the fact that you know people their musical tastes are much more broad ranging than that and that's where you need this psychological coverage because that can explain why someone who listens to say jazz will also listen to classical music. We'll probably also listen to say ambient music as well. It speaks to openness to experience one of the big life personality dimensions. So psychologists can tell you why people would listen to quite wide ranging musical styles on which, which of those genres cluster together. But an analysis just based solely on musical properties alone can't really do that.
David: One of the big commercial drivers of social media for one but also massive pitfalls is that it can be a bit of a, a bit of an echo chamber. It learns what our preferences are and we all the content that we that we're exposed to and it mainly sort of dishes up mainly more of the same really. Yeah. Are we falling into a bit of a musical echo chamber where we're just being dished up in the same?
Dr Adrian North: Yeah, I think there is that absolute real risk of that and it's, I think it's absolutely crucial that the, the, the streaming services in particular building a much stronger understanding of what's motivating people's listening cause that then will explain why they want to listen to quite a diverse range of music. And of course that's, that's why presumably they're paying a monthly subscription often for a streaming service because they want access to a range of music. So if instead you just keep pushing the same kind of stuff to them, why subscribe? Why not just, why not just buy out right at that relatively small range of music and you're over, you know, the lifetime of a subscription, you'll save a fortune.
David: And not to mention you, well, once a subscription is gone that's it, you don't have access to their music anymore.
Dr Adrian North: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
David: One area of your research has also been, well, not as what we're listening to and and how we're listening to it, but also where you're listening to it. What, what impact does that have?
Dr Adrian North: It's quite interesting. I mean, so it looks like there's essentially three drivers of, of people's music close in very broad brush terms. There's the music itself, the properties of the music and the variables there that we know are relatively important. There's obviously aspects of the listener, him or herself here, but most obviously you know, your age, your personality and, and a bunch of other factors. But then in the mid 1990s, it started to become clear that there was this third class of variables which were all around the listening situation. And in particular that there seems to be kind of two processes going on there. Number one is that people are clearly using music to get what they want from the particular situation. They're using music, you know, most obviously to create an atmosphere, but we'd go a lot more than that. You use music to concentrate to achieve a particular mood and on all kinds of other factors. But it works the other way round as well in that the situation and the music that's playing in that situation directly impinges on us and our behaviour.
Dr Adrian North: So in the, in the particularly, in the late 1990s, myself and David Hargreaves we, we did an awful lot of work looking at music and commercial environments, looking at how music can influence, you know, the products that people buy, you know, in things like how quickly they shop, the products they choose to purchase, how long they keep waiting, and how long they think they've been waiting for and so on. And there's a whole cluster of variables that are up until that point in time just simply hadn't been recognised.
David: So I guess that's a little bit like how, for example, if I'm driving, I might be happy to listen to rock while I'm on a road trip for example. But if I'm stuck in heavy traffic, I might want to listen to something, some classical music instead.
Dr Adrian North: Yeah, absolutely. So we know that one of the, the peak hour in the day for people to listen to music is, is basically between 5:00 PM and 6:00 PM at least in the Western world. And that got clearly coincides with people driving home. The reason, other reason why we can be so confident of that is when we ask people about what we are using music for at different times of the day, between five and 6:00 PM, people will consistently tell you that they are using music to relax. So clearly that that's a really big job that music does specifically is calm us all down as we go home. But again, it works the other way around to, you know, go with your, your point about driving. We know also that music influences the way that you drive. So we know that as the music gets louder or faster, it impinges on the amount of essentially psychological resource you have available to devote to driving. So we know that something I did many years ago, now we have people just doing a driving simulator on a computer and when you play music that's loud and fast, people have, you know that much, they just drive less well. Whereas when you play them exactly the same music but slower, quieter version, they become much more efficient at driving. So it's, it's this kind of two way interaction or it's a two, two way street between the person and the situation. It's, you know, the situation affects the person and the person's using music to affect the situation too.
David: How does music impact the way that we see ourselves. Our identity is not just what we're up to but, but who we are?
Dr Adrian North: Crucially. It does is, is the first thing that's worth saying. But of course it, it, it works in a number of different levels. So there's, there's a, there's a pretty well established model within social psychology which talks about music having an influence on, on four levels of processes. And this is a little bit nerdy, but just, just bear with me and it'll become more interesting in a minute. I hope. We, we, we're now on the basis that on the, on the kind of the basic level of this hierarchy of social influences or what gets called intra individual factors, factors solely inside you, like say your personality is one of them. The next level up, you have the so called inter individual level, which is when two people relate to one another on the basis of them being individuals and we know that music plays a part there as well. So for example, if I say I'm a fan of genre A and you're also a fan of genre A, you will like me more as a direct consequence of that. And on the flip side of that is true as well. Unfortunately, if, if, if we, if we don't like the same genres then you know, for example, we know it plays a role in, in interpersonal attraction. Then at the next level up again you get so-called interpersonal social influences. And in this case, in terms of music, we know that if I say I'm a fan of genre A, you would be more likely to assume I have the characteristics of other people you know who like genre A. So if you know someone who likes genre A who also happens to be really happy or really upbeat and optimistic, you're more likely to assume that I'm happy and optimistic and not beaten and so on. And then of course at the broadest level of the lot, you've got these broad cultural influences as well, which to do with, you know, not just the music that our culture tends to, you know, listen to more, but also in terms of the broader values that the culture has. And this is something I was, I was literally writing about just yesterday where you look at the, there's one big model of culture produced by a guy, a guy called get Hofstader from the Netherlands and he proposes that you can conceptualize culture in terms of six dimensions and we know that the, the values that are embodied in those dimensions themselves relate to all kinds of different musical tastes as well. So, right the way through however you care to construct your identity, be it solely what I know about myself, what you know about me as a person, what you know me about me as on the base of my membership of a group or even just what you know about me as my member of a broad culture. Music is part of that identity at each and every single level.
David: Do you think our ability to stream anything we want anytime. Do you think there's a risk of that? Perhaps cheapening the craft?
Dr Adrian North: There is always the risk that, well I think yes and no.
David: It's a loaded question.
Dr Adrian North: No, no, no. And it's, I know what you're saying that yeah, any economist will tell you that if something is in effectively infinite supply for you, then it will lose its, its perceived value too very quickly and, and that that's true. So if you think about the music that someone's listening to as they're driving into work in the morning, they may not particularly value that particular track that highly in that particular moment. But there's still this kind of broader level value of music and I think there, you stop with the advent of streaming, I think you start to see music become more valuable and it's because music becoming presumably more present in people's everyday life. I think at that broader conceptual level, I think music actually becomes more valuable to people. Not less valuable, but I think it's, it's the individual piece of music in the moment that gets cheapened by it potentially.
David: So it's a bit of a bit of a mixed thing. Where do you see things trending in this space? What are some of the, the newest developments that we've seen in terms of of, of music availability?
Dr Adrian North: The big thing which is coming is is the streaming industry needing to come up with better recommendations. And clearly there is scope there for psychology to, to make make a contribution to this if only because at the moment there's relatively little psychological contribution to the streaming algorithms. It's very much based around the properties of the music. And that's because that's relatively easy for a computer to analyze. You know, you can upload 40, 50, 60 million tracks into a computer, let it whirr away for however long it needs to whirr away for. And at the end of that, you've got a very nice picture of all the music in your database. But in order to come up with really good recommendations, you need to understand the person that's listening to it as well. And the situation in which they're listening to it and what people want from that music. And it's only when you understand those two other pieces as well that you can then start to generate really smart recommendations. So for example, tonight when you go home from, you know, from the university, you will put on some music quite probably, and you will know exactly what you want that music to do. But it's because that music is tailored to you to the kind of day you've had and the kind of evening you've got coming up and what you want to achieve, where, what state of mind do you want to arrive in when you get home tonight? And simply knowing about the music alone won't achieve that.
David: There's a lot more to it.
Dr Adrian North: Yeah. Your algorithm needs to know about you rather than just about music. And it also needs to know what you're planning to do and where you are. And until the algorithms built in that they're never going to be that great. They're going to be okay, but they're never going to be brilliant and they're never going to nail it.
David: And the interesting thing as well is that it's a lot of this, this thought process will be happening in the background and I might not be actively thinking, well and I'm going to be going to a movie tonight so I want to see this, this and this and this. It will be, it will be whirring away in the background.
Dr Adrian North: You are right. Although again, and this, this starts to then speak to your issues around your privacy and so on. But you know to be honest your phone probably does know because it knows what's in your diary. So state your example, you know your phone probably does know if you're going to the cinema tonight, your phone probably does know if you've had a busy work day cause it's so lots of meetings in your diary. Whereas if your diary was empty, ah, he's probably had a pretty laid back day.
David: Pull up the itinerary for a travel ...
Dr Adrian North: It can be done with relative ease. Yeah and of course the, the aspects of you as an individual like for example your personality or your, your, your, your broader values, they don't change that much. They do change a little over time, but you're looking, you know, small changes over very extended periods of time. So even in that case, that's kind of information you'd only have to tap into the system once every few years. So it's definitely there in conceptual terms and technologically I'm pretty confident in as possible too. But it's, it's obviously that requires yet another set of investment from the music industry to actually go down that route. And obviously at the minute, given they've had a pretty rough time over the last 10 or 20 years or so, you know, you, I think you could probably excuse them doing a little bit of profit taking at the moment.
David: Do you think it might be a matter of, well, let's see if we can well we have to, we have to wait and see if the company could even make it to to not getting into chapter 11 bankruptcy before they can even get these new.
Dr Adrian North: Yeah, like say, and, and, you know, obviously setting this up is expensive. Just simply, you know, maintaining the licenses to have access to that music. That's the phenomenally expensive exercise. So this is the kind of thing that you could only do if you had a very, very large number of subscribers. It's not the kind of thing you could do with any ease if you're a relatively small startup, for example.
David: Are any of these services profitable?
Dr Adrian North: Um I believe I've got finishes that, I think I read something the other day that talked about Spotify haven't gone over into profit. I'm not entirely certain, but certainly its there or thereabouts and it's, as with all these, it, it's very much just a function of the subscriber base and you know, it's, it certainly works with scale.
David: Hmm. Well of course cause if you're buying, if you're buying a you know, buying a massive all music licence is essentially going to be a fixed cost.
Dr Adrian North: To some extent I'm not that familiar with the detail of it.
David: Okay we wont go there.
Dr Adrian North: But yeah, I mean I would presume if, if I was a record label, I would certainly insist on, you know, we will charge you a certain amount depending on the certain amount of subscribers who are listening. But I'm afraid I don't know, I'm sorry. I suspect that might be a matter of commercial confidence anyway, it maybe that not that many people know.
David: Best probably not go over that area then.
Dr Adrian North: Cross over that one, yeah.
David: So when are recommendations going to start getting good [laugh] Another disgracefully loaded question.
Dr Adrian North: No, no, no. Oh, you know what, I rather than answer that directly, I'll tell you a very brief story. As, as, as a, as a PhD student in 1996, you know? Yeah. I remember at the time, yeah. When myself and my, my supervisor, we edited a book and in the forward we were breathlessly that the technology even existed to download music to a portable laptop computer on a paper play basis. Six years later the iPod came out and ever since that day I've been 'Eugh! If only!' If only we'd had the courage of our convictions. I think the bottom line is, is what I'm trying to say is you can often see it's coming quite a few years ahead of the actuality because of course just because you can conceptually do something, it doesn't necessarily mean that it makes commercial sense to, you know, to go through the expense of actually implementing all that.
David: Concord was perfectly possible, but it didn't really make that much money did it?
Dr Adrian North: Yeah. So I think it's really kind of a two part answer your question. The technology, Oh sorry. The technology is there to make the recommendations really, really good. And I think the understanding of what makes drives musical taste is there to make the recommendations really, really good. Whether or not the investment to bring that about is worth the incremental cost that, that that's, that's I think probably between Tim Cook and his spreadsheet.
David: And whoever runs Spotify.
Dr Adrian North: Exactly.
David: Can you tell me more about one, another one of your studies that you've done? I haven't got the abstracts here, I'm afraid. What's another study that you've done you'd like to tell us about?
Dr Adrian North: Oh gosh.
David: A particularly interesting one. Or uninteresting one, your choice.
Dr Adrian North: Okay, sure. I'll tell you about a few studies if you like, cause it's something we haven't really touched on here. So I'm, I'm, I mentioned earlier one, one other aspect or one other area in which all this plays out is which is around the use of music and commercial environments. So at the moment whenever people think about music thing, you know, they tend to think about streaming services, smartphones and so on. But the other side of this is the music that is played to us by, by, you know, businesses as we go about our daily lives. And I think what's really interesting about that is is up until about 15 or 20 years ago, it was really, really neglected. So up until then, and this isn't necessarily all that harsh, there are a few business out there who are a bit more sophisticated than this, but it was typically the case whereby the business, you know, the provider of the music would say to a business, okay, tell us about the typical age of your customers. And you know, write one paragraph on any particular business concerns that you might have. And then because this was the 1990s they would then send them a few CDs in the post and that became the in-store music policy. That was it. Now what we've subsequently found out since then is that we know that if you select the right kind of music for a particular business, then there's plenty of evidence on this from people, not just like me, that there are others who find this too, where if you pick the right kind of music, you can typically have positive impact on sales of 10 20 30% they are not uncommon figures and and, and in particular you can impact a whole range of different variables. And I think it's interesting to come back to the streaming services again, interestingly, they're now starting to forget to tune to this as well. You know, they have kind of a business facing version of their streaming service to start trying to tap into some of these effects. So we know that music can influence the products that people purchase. So I've done stuff where we've played French and German music in a supermarket leading to people buying far more French or German wine respectively. We've done stuff showing that if the music has, if you're like an upmarket stereotype associated with it, like say classical music, people start spending more money and they really do about 10 15 20% . You can use music to influence the perception of the premises as being for a certain type of customer or not for a certain type of customer. You can use music to influence not just how long people will wait around for, but how long they think they've been waiting. And you can even use music to attract people to a particular part of a set of premises.
David: I can see that being used at airports, tricking people into thinking they're not waiting that long for their ...
Dr Adrian North: All kinds of things like this. I mean, and the most crucial one I think for a lot of retailers is, you know, one big problem they have is getting people to go upstairs or downstairs or to the back. You know, people you know, tend to only come to the front bit. So, and again, what this, there's a piece of research we did specifically where we played music and a particular bit of a very large area. And if the people like the music, they're more to go to that little part of the area. If they dislike the music though, they're less likely to go there than if you even play no music at all. So again, it speaks to this idea that it's not just playing any music versus no music. You've got to get the right kind of music. So there's all kinds of influences like this. Yeah, I could go on. Yeah. We know that fast music leads to people drinking more quickly. It leads to people eating more quickly. If you play slow music in a supermarket, people will shop more slowly, but they browse more and so spend more. There's, there's a, there's an awful lot of this kind of research out there now that wasn't there about 15, 20 years ago. And again, particularly now that retailers themselves, have got access to the streaming services and the big library of music, they can really start to take advantage of the these kinds of effects.
David: Well, I guess that brings us onto a little money saving pro tip. If you want to save money when you're at DJs, listen to some some radio one or some hip FM and if you want to save money when you're at a restaurant and listen to some classical music. What's a, what's another study that you've done?
Dr Adrian North: So another thing I've been really interested in recently is looking at kind of very large samples of music and very large samples of music lyrics and looking at the kind of patterns you can see in there. And then that's really been quite good fun. And again, this is one of these real fringe benefits of music being digitized. Of course, now that you know, everything is that and digitized that means you can, frankly, you can put it into Excel pretty easily, which means you can start to analyse it pretty easily. So what we've been doing very recently, we published this just about six months ago, is, is testing some of the big theories in aesthetics, which themselves literally go back to the days of Plato and Aristotle and actually seeing if they're born out in music sales. So one thing we did where we well it really does come direct from Plato, Aristotle, one of them, and I forget who, I've got no idea which one it was, said something like "a master of art avoids excess", in other words, too much of something "and deficit", too little of something, "but seeks the intermediate and chooses this". Okay. In other words, moderation is everything. So what we did, we got two separate databases, one of a quarter of a million pieces of music that had basically enjoyed any sort of commercial success in the United States, be it played on the radio more than I think five times or something like that. And another 143,000 pieces of music that had the same status in the UK and then looked at the relationship between the properties of the music and their commercial success. And actually we didn't find that, you know, Plato and Aristotle were wrong. What we found specifically is that it was basically, of those pieces. We found that it was people, the material that tended to be more popular was the music that was either a bit more exciting than average or a bit more calming than average. And in the stuff that was more in between those two were slightly less popular. And again that, that that speaks to the idea of music being contextualized. You know, of course if you're, if music that's a little bit exciting or a little bit calming is disproportionately popular, what that's telling you is that they, that indeed that's people using music to achieve a particular state of mind. But it's not people seeking the intermediate and choosing this. And of course you can do just the same thing with lyrics. Cause of course, you know, you can access lyrics in, in text file format relatively easily, which in turn means that you can put them through text analysis programs. And something we did there was looking at how pop music lyrics reflect the economy. So from memory, what we found there was in this case we got about 5,000 pieces of music, all of which had been in the top five singles in the UK sales charts.
Dr Adrian North: And then we looked at how that related to turbulence on the London stock exchange. Basically we just looked at the standard deviation and the closing price. So basically the more turbulent the stock market is, the more economic turmoil there is, the more stable it is, the greater economic stability varies. And what we found is that from memory is that basically as basically the lyrics became more comforting and calming in times of economic turmoil. In other words, it's people looking to music to provide some sort of emotional sucker and in, in, in times of economic and often social turbulence. So again, it's fit, it fits with this idea of people actually using music to achieve a particular goal at this, you know, in this case at the level of economies and populations. So it's just the same process that was as you or I choosing to listen to music to calm down on the way home from work. You know, it's, yeah. You know, a population of music listeners is actually just, you know, however many million people individually listen to music. But it's interesting that these effects aggregate up. There's similarly, there's another great bit of research. One of my favorite bits of research ever done that was just done way back in the 1990s by a guy called M. I think it's Halzillow and what he found is that you could use pessimism in pop music lyrics to predict changes in American gross national product. And so basically, as I recall, he found that as lyrics became more pessimistic, so six months down the line, economic optimism dipped, and as any economist can tell you, economic optimism dipping is one of the big drivers of a recession coming. So in other words, you can use changes in pop music lyrics to predict recession.
David: So it shows up the mirror to ourselves.
Dr Adrian North: Absolutely. And it's this idea that again, music is part of daily life. The music you listen to on the radio or you know, on your, on your phone or whatever as you're driving around those messages hit home and either you're using music to reflect the environment you're in and try to deal with that. Or arguably in some cases, even though you've got the music, creating this national level mood and creating, you know, a nation in a particular mindset. And I think that's absolutely fascinating. You know, it's, you know, everyone knows or everyone feels that music must be having some sort of influence on them. But to actually see it coming out in terms of these macro economic drivers of, you know, really significant stuff like stock market turbulence, gross national product, recession and, and so on. That's really quite interesting, I think.
David: The first 30 seconds of a song are very important, particularly for new artists, isn't it?
Dr Adrian North: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the big challenges with with music streaming is of course if you're a big brand, and I use the word deliberately say Paul MacCartney, Beyonce, whatever, you know, people are going to come to you. Whereas if you're a new band or a new musician who people don't know about, first of all they've got to find you. But, but crucially, you know, you're only going to receive your royalty after people who've listened to your track for a certain period of time, from memory, I think it is about 30 seconds. So what that's, you know, and, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence out there and you know, the industry, of course and new musicians, have certainly cottoned on to this, its starting to change the music a little bit, because what it means is it's absolutely imperative that you keep people listening for the first 30 seconds, the first one minute of your track. You know, if, you know, if I had any sort of musical ability whatsoever and I was putting out music, I would every single good idea. I will get into those first 30 seconds to a minute because after that, frankly you've been paid and you're in the game. But that is clearly starting to drive the way in which people develop their music. It's, I was reading a piece not that long ago and I think it was the guardian kind of bemoaning the death of the introduction in music and pop music in particular. And this, this is of course the argument why. They were saying that you know, you've got to hit people right between the eyes from, from the get go. It's interesting as well, I've always thought about it is it's the Beatles are absolutely brilliant at this. A little game you can play with yourself is put on any Beatles track and inside the first 45 seconds you've basically heard the entire song. Now contrast that with, you know, you'll have had, you know, you know the chorus, the bridge. Sorry, the, the verse, the chorus and the bridge and contrast that with, you know, an awful lot of other artists, they don't seem to get on with it quite so fast. And I've always wondered if that's part of the reason why the Beatles were so successful is because they absolutely nailed it in that first 30 to 45 seconds,.
David: How has music streaming or the instant availability of music affected the sort of genres and sub genres of music that we're listening to?
Dr Adrian North: I think to some extent you can make the case that by having music, you know, omnipresent and, and all of it available to you. You know, you could argue it, it might even form the death of genres. I mean certainly, you know, maybe I'm getting old, but you have certainly it seems to me like the, there's an increasing speed on increasing acceleration of the fracturing of, of genres into increasingly niche, niche sub-genres, which of course makes sense because you know, you can market them in that way and people can search for them using the right keyword. You know, if you know the name of that sub, sub, sub sub genre, you can search a streaming service and get all the music in that sub genre so you can do it. And eventually, you know, if you carry on down that line, you end up with no such thing as a genre. You just have an individual musician or an individual composer.
David: An individual song,
Dr Adrian North: An individual song. Yeah, maybe it goes down to that level of eventually. So I, I think it's to some extent, I think it's, it's a case of while ever it's commercially useful to have genres labeled as such. They will, they will clearly persist in that way, but it's very much, now, its not so much a genre. I think you would argue it's a keyword. It's a search term and I think that in the context of a streaming service, I think that that's arguably a better way of understanding what we mean by genres. It's not a collection of musicians, it's not a collection of albums. It's not a subculture. It's a keyword search term.
David: And one last question, Adrian, what are you up to right now? Well, not right now. What research are you up to right now?
Dr Adrian North: Not, not literally right now, but I certainly as of yesterday evening what I was doing was, erm I've been getting increasingly interested in the relationship between cultural values and music. Most I mentioned earlier that most of the research on, oh if you look at social influences on behaviour, it works at four different levels, factors inside you, factors between individuals, between groups and at the broad cultural level. The great majority of research that's been done has been very much at the lower down levels – the factors internal to ourselves, like personality has been done an awful lot, and factors relating to people relating to one another as individuals. What's scarcely been done at all quantitatively at least, is looking at music at the very broad cultural level. So say factors like economic recession and and so on. So literally what I'm working on at the moment is something which looks at personality but also personal values defined slightly more broadly than that, but also cultural values. So, for example, to what extent do people value individualism versus collectivism. Looking at how all those relate to musical tastes and the uses to which we put music. And I think what's interesting is that although it seems, you know, blindingly obvious that that music as a cultural product ought to link to cultural values. As far as I'm aware, this data set is the first one that actually provide some quantitative evidence that that's the case. I mean, maybe I've missed something in my literature review, but I'm pretty sure we haven't. And yeah, it's the first evidence out there. I think that's quantifies the link between culture and the ways in which people use music. And that's, you know, you know, that that could run for 10 years that, that line of research I think.
David: Oh, that sounds quite interesting. And well, do you have anything else to add before we go?
Dr Adrian North: Ah, yeah, I think that that's, as I recall, that, that that's pretty well the CV.
David: Okay, cool. Well, thank you very much, Adrian for for, for coming in and sharing your knowledge on this topic.
Dr Adrian North: You're welcome.
David: And you've been listening to The Future Of – a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you have any questions about today's topic, please feel free to get in touch by following the links in the shownotes. Bye for now.