Where Pitchfork Meets Keynes

I was having a discussion with some friends in the media and music business recently, specifically about the much-discussed (read: over-discussed) phenomenon where bands emerge and bubble up from the blogosphere and become overnight sensations in a teapot, taking the hipster world by storm, becoming ubiquitous in all the tastemaker places almost simultaneously. Someone commented that this phenomenon is really particular and endemic to the indie rock world -- where there's a massive wave of over-hype and artists are thrust out into the world not even fully formed, subject to a premature "next thing" consensus and an inevitable backlash to come. 

I don't think this is confined to music at all. Political consensus among the chattering classes is probably the most direct and clear example, with so much media, so much airtime to fill on deadline, and so many predictions that "have" to be made in the face of subjectiveness and a major herd mentality. It's also common to quickly moving technology trends (iPhone, Twitter, lots of other gadgets) and even financial opinions (Jim Cramer and Motley Fool come to mind especially). And probably quite a few other things. Just straight old TMZ style pop culture too.

But confining the discussion specifically within the confines of the music business, what I think is interesting is the degree to which the indie rock world exemplifies a certain set of attributes. You don't see the same hyper-"meta" discussions and self referential issues in other genres so much, at least not in my estimation. In straight bubblegum pop you might just as easily have the overwhelming hype and meteoric rise, and even in more esoteric niches like country or jazz or even bluegrass you definitely have flavors of the month, someone who makes a breakout performance at a festival or a last minute substitution. 

As a sidenote -- I actually think classical is a close second to indie in the herd-hype department, with that last example of a last minute substitution and seemingly coming out of nowhere being a great example of how many well known artists -- most notably Leonard Bernstein and Lang Lang, among others -- got their big breaks. And both suffered a torrential backlash several years into their career as well. 

But anyways, the basic concept is pretty well established. What's interesting to me is that in indie rock (which I should make sure to define here as the hipster, Pitchfork, blogger world, etc -- not in the indie=independent sense) it seems to have come to dominate the landscape. 

And of course, it conjures up parallels in economics. Specifically the classic quote about the stock market and investing from The General Theory, by John Maynard Keynes: 

"Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees."

I've always thought this was a pretty good metaphor as well for the worst parts of the hype machine that seems to swirl around indie rock, in the way mentioned above. The issue here isn't that you have a scene that's incredibly dynamic and changing, that artists come out of nowhere and get a ton of hype and then recede. There are plenty of reasons why you'd see those kinds of things happen. For example, another just-as-plausible hypothesis would be that it's an artistic scene that is intensely focused on novelty, hence the quick rise and short shelf life of many such artists. 

But I don't think that's quite it. I think it's the self-referential nature of the whole thing that is the most fundamental attribute. Everyone is looking at what everyone else is doing. In economics or ecology you'd describe it with some concepts from complex adaptive system dynamics, where you have systems or implied algorithms that are self-referential and loop back on themselves, and have both positive and negative feedback loops working at cross purposes. Not too far from the idea Keynes intuited in the 1930's in the quote above. 

So the more hype builds around you the more success you have. That's a positive feedback loop, a network externality. If 10 influential indie blogs plug you then that might lead to 30 more the next month. But there's a negative feedback loop. The more success you have the more you arouse the distaste and backlash of many members of the community. You have everyone looking at everyone else to see what they think before they make up their mind. 

People's opinions of an artist's intrinsic merit are in part based on their perception of who else likes them, what kind of people like them, how many of those people there are, and how long this has been going on. Like in the beauty contest example above, many participants are picking the prettiest competitor at a beauty contest not based on what they personally like, but based on their impression of what they think other people's impression will be. 

So you have two countervailing forces at work -- and the result is the classic boom-bust cycle that has tons of parallels. In ecology the textbook one is watching deer populations skyrocket, then they eat all the available food, and then half of them starve and die. Then they do the same thing over and over again. In economics it's the classic business cycle boom/recession wave in the stock market and economy as a whole. It's the natural outcome of a wicked combination of positive and negative feedback loops, both governing the same variable, in this case success and prestige and "hype." 

Or to simplify: 1) The more successful you are the more people like you. 2) The more successful you are the more people hate you. Pour them together, and you get breakneck change, massive and premature over-hype and massive and premature backlash. Both often divorced from any underlying actual merit of the music in question. Just like financial bubbles tend to affect the good firms as well as the bad, both on the way up and the way down. The truly great stuff endures, but when you're looking at a week to week timetable that boom-bust cycle is all you can see.

I think it's food for thought. The interaction of positive and negative feedback loops in self-referencing systems with network effects is well known in complexity theory to be the driver for some very interesting emergent phenomena, not just in simple rules-based systems but in applied social sciences as well. Perhaps there are some parallels to be drawn in marketing, media, and even entertainment and popular culture. 

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