Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation

摘要

The most striking finding of Gabriel Rossman's Climbing the Charts appears in the first three pages: the cumulative adoption of hit songs by radio stations follows an exponential curve rather than a logistic curve. The rate at which new stations start playing a song (this is what adoption means in the current context) begins high and declines over time, in contrast to an S-shaped trajectory whereby the adoption rate begins low, rises to a maximum, and then declines. The distinction is analytically meaningful, because an exponential trajectory suggests that influence comes from outside the adopting population while a logistic curve suggests intra-population influence.