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Another infected
Photo: Kiko Jimenez / Westend61 / Getty Images
Justin Bieber and Kid Laroi are currently leading the global music charts with “Stay”.
The song also takes first place on Spotify - a real catchy tune, it seems.
Depending on your taste in music, this can be puzzling.
Scientists now provide an explanation of how hits are made.
According to this, songs and soundtracks are spreading almost as much as an epidemic.
"There is every indication that many of the social processes that accelerate the spread of disease could also drive the spread of music," said Dora Rosati of McMaster University in the Canadian province of Ontario.
"Both musical tastes and infectious diseases develop through social connections in certain groups."
The experts used a standard mathematical model for epidemic forecasting to study the patterns of music downloads on platforms to learn how songs are becoming popular.
To do this, they analyzed a database with almost 1.4 billion downloads from the discontinued streaming service MixRadio.
The result: The model is just as good for music as it is for contagious diseases to describe the respective spread.
The curves would look very similar.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
Electronic music is particularly contagious
“If you come into contact with someone who is sick while you are sick, you run a certain risk of becoming infected.
Songs do not have to be a physical contact - it could also be that a friend has used a new song in his Instagram story, so I'll listen to it, ”Rosati said in the Guardian.
It's the digital form of word-of-mouth.
The researchers were even able to determine the number of reproductions for individual genres.
In the case of viruses, this indicates how many other people an infected person also infects on average.
According to this, different music genres are differently »contagious«, spreading sometimes faster and sometimes slower among friends and acquaintances.
Electronic music is therefore the most contagious.
It's shared and passed so many times that it spreads 190 times faster than measles.
Rock and hip-hop also have above-average R values.
Pop music, on the other hand, ends up in the middle of the field.
The experts found the lowest value for Metal.
Infect a hundred people with one tweet
However, this does not necessarily mean that more electronic songs will be downloaded overall.
They just spread much faster in a certain population group, for example if they are social media-savvy.
Pop music also runs a lot on the radio and is therefore perhaps less shared, the researchers suspect.
»The reason why we sometimes see high R values in songs is that you can simply send a message and have already infected a hundred people.
A song spreads much faster than an infectious disease, ”said Thomas Rawson of Imperial College London.
At least one can defend oneself against serious infections with music.
"There are probably many people in the population who, because of their taste, are already immune to a certain genre like hip-hop or electronic music," says Rawson.
"My grandma, for example, is almost certainly resistant to the infection from trap and dubstep."
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