Social-Acceleration observed in Music and Literature Charts

The collective voting through individual buying decisions measured by music charts can lead to self-organized phenomena. This has been shown in the analysis of four album charts. The album lifetime is nowadays distributed like a power-law, a telltale sign of self-organized criticality. This has evolved since the 1980s, when the lifetime was a log-normally distributed. Using an information theoretical approach we hypothesize that this evolution is due to shortening of the universal time scale of opinion formation.

A similar distinction is observable when comparing the lifetime distribution of weekly and daily compiled album charts on Spotify. This indicates that the above mentioned time scale of opinion formation in the cultural domain of music albums is nowadays below a week but not yet shorter than a day.

Social acceleration can also be shown by the chart diversity, which for music charts increased by a factor of more than two in the last four decades. Surprisingly a similar trend can be observed in the chart diversity of the New York Times best-seller list. Additionally, the time needed for a number-one hit to reach the top of chart has decreased from more than five weeks to bellow one week. Thereby, the speed of cultural penetration has increased drastically.