How Does Popularity Influence Consumers’ Online Music Choices?

How do consumers choose what to buy on Amazon or what to listen to on Spotify? Do they scroll endlessly through the options, review the ratings or select what is most popular among other viewers?

While some studies have examined how product placement and ratings affect consumer behavior on online platforms, researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas recently examined how popularity also impacts buyers’ decisions when choosing online products or entertainment.

The research, which is relevant for platforms such as Netflix, Amazon and Spotify, could help businesses understand better how consumers behave online, said Dr. Shervin Shahrokhi Tehrani, assistant professor of marketing in the Naveen Jindal School of Management and corresponding author of the study published online in August in the journal Marketing Science.

The researchers used data from a field experimental music platform called MusicLab to form two groups of consumers: one that saw a list of songs with their popularity (number of downloads) disclosed and one that was presented with the list randomly sorted without any popularity information revealed. Researchers zeroed in on popularity because other studies have shown that consumers tend to be swayed by product position — they scroll from top to bottom and pick selections near the top.

Researchers gained several insights:

• When consumers see what’s popular, they search more efficiently and download more products.
• Consumers spend more time searching when popularity of songs is disclosed and songs are sorted randomly.
• When people are presented with selections based on their own preferences and popularity combined, they tend to engage more with the content because it is easier to search options specifically tailored to them.

For consumers, the inclusion of product popularity can help streamline decision-making.

“When a group of people follow something, that thing becomes popular,” Shahrokhi Tehrani said. “This is a signal for others that probably this is a good thing, so people think it’s more high quality.”

For platforms that rely on subscriptions to make money, disclosing what’s popular helps keep customers satisfied because they can find products they like without much effort, according to the researchers.

“If Netflix cannot appropriately target you with good movies you like, what happens after two or three days? You become tired, and you cancel the subscription,” Shahrokhi Tehrani said. “If your platform makes money from selling items or from subscription fees, it’s better for the business to both show the popularity and rank items based on the preferences of each consumer.”

Conversely, such search efficiency can work against a platform that makes money from advertising because it limits the time a consumer spends searching for an item, he said.

“In this case, it is better to randomly sort items,” Shahrokhi Tehrani said. “This encourages people to click more, which results in more chances to show them ads.”

The researchers concluded that platforms need a balance between providing quality information and allowing people to search for other products that are not as popular.

Although the researchers analyzed experimental data, they said more insight into consumer behavior and business profitability could be gained from field experiments with real platforms.

Other contributors to the study were Dr. Brian Ratchford, professor emeritus of marketing at UT Dallas, lead author Ata Jameei Osgouei PhD’24, now assistant professor of marketing at Fairfield University, and Dr. Andrew T. Ching, professor of marketing and economics in the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University.