Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music...

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FMiguelez
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Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music...

Post by FMiguelez »

I stumbled upon this article about the study, and it's fascinating to see how we are beginning to understand, at the deepest possible level, how we REALLY function and operate. It's conceptually so simple, but the details are extremelly complex!

Everything we experience, even love or the pleasure of listening to MUSIC, is ultimately brain chemistry at work, as neuroscience has been showing us.
Isn't that amazing? Isn't it mind-blowingly wonderful how such great feelings can be traced back to simple and primitive survival instincts?

So, if you want to sell more music, learn to set on your audience a sense of expectation (and fulfill it or not at your own risk), and make them have lots of "chatter" between their nucleus accumbens and their auditory cortex. That'll make them more likely to buy new music from you, according to the study....
Notice in the text a key word: PREDICTION.

I'll look for the original study.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 143056.htm
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by stubbsonic »

Reading your intro to the article and study has literally fired off my salivary glands.

I don't see a pavlovian emoticon. Perhaps...

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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by daniel.sneed »

Is there any prediction study of what will make us read, or not, such an absurd research report?
I guess we're on to a Monty Python sequence. Great!
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by FMiguelez »

daniel.sneed wrote:Is there any prediction study of what will make us read, or not, such an absurd research report?
I guess we're on to a Monty Python sequence. Great!
:?:

How is it absurd, exactly?

Are you challenging their evidence and predicitions arising from it?

The article is probably not amazingly written, but what it means is. Think about it for a moment... How do you actually come to make your decisions?
Why do you like certain patterns of complex sine waves (music) but hate others?

I cited it as one more little piece of evidence of how we function and what drives us ultimately, especially it being music-related in this case.
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by cuttime »

Interesting article, thanks for sharing. I would be very cautious of any conclusions based on fMRI studies, though. Their efficacy has been called into question a great deal lately. Also, speaking for myself, I think the way musicians react to, and choose music can be radically different from "lay" (for want of a better word) people.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/20 ... are-flaws/
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by stubbsonic »

What I especially liked considering was trying to convert things like pattern recognition and expectation management as a compositional "flow" concept. I don't really know what to make of all that, but it is important to remember we're all a bunch of animals at the end of the day.
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by HCMarkus »

stubbsonic wrote:... it is important to remember we're all a bunch of animals at the end of the day.
Is that why we love woofers and tweeters?
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by daniel.sneed »

FMiguelez, of course, to each his own.
When it comes to art, my guts exhibit strong allergie to marketing.
When it goes down to pseudo-scientific marketing, it turns to be extremely funny to me.

Whatsoever, I do realize that marketing does exist, and that I'm a customer, too...

BTW, if creativity is a large part of your job, you may have good time with that old John Cleese lecture.
IMHO, it's more and more up to date as times go by
https://www.brainpickings.org/index.php ... vity-1991/
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by stubbsonic »

daniel.sneed wrote: When it goes down to pseudo-scientific marketing, it turns to be extremely funny to me.
Just because you find the science to be funny, that doesn't make it pseudo-science.

IF you read the research study, and you found errors/problems with their science, you should share that, and not just say "It's absurd" or " it's funny." Perhaps you find the phenomenon or the subject matter to be an absurd subject to study, or you find it funny that people would take the time to study it. But dismissing it as pseudo-science is neither impressive nor fair if you didn't take the time to read the study.
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by FMiguelez »

daniel.sneed wrote:FMiguelez, of course, to each his own.
When it comes to art, my guts exhibit strong allergie to marketing.
When it goes down to pseudo-scientific marketing, it turns to be extremely funny to me.

Whatsoever, I do realize that marketing does exist, and that I'm a customer, too...

BTW, if creativity is a large part of your job, you may have good time with that old John Cleese lecture.
IMHO, it's more and more up to date as times go by
https://www.brainpickings.org/index.php ... vity-1991/
MARKETING?
I don't know what you're talking about. Are we talking about the same article?

This is about SCIENCE, not art, which you would know if you had read the article.

Come on, Dan, it's NOT about "marketting". It's about how we now know, thanks to RESEARCH, how we get pleasure from music, why we like certain styles but not others, and how we come to make our decisions (in this case purchasing music).

Now, I don't have access to the original study. But if the article I cited is to be accepted, the study got enough real-world EVIDENCE that allowed the scientists to make reliable PREDICTIONS of which of the tested subjects would buy a song x but not song y, and when, just by looking at their brain activity in cetain areas.
I think that IS remarkable. And thre are many other similar studies that allow the researchers to PREDICT other behaviours or actions or thoughts in their test subjects.

"Pseudo-scientific marketing"???

Perhaps you can quote where exactly you found this "pseudo-scientific marketing"???
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by FMiguelez »

cuttime wrote:Interesting article, thanks for sharing. I would be very cautious of any conclusions based on fMRI studies, though. Their efficacy has been called into question a great deal lately.
Interesting

Also, speaking for myself, I think the way musicians react to, and choose music can be radically different from "lay" (for want of a better word) people.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/20 ... are-flaws/
Sorry. I hadn't seen your response.

Thank you for the article. I will read it during the evening.

If doubt has been casted on fMRI research, I certainly want to know about it, and learn if their claim has any merit.


If what you mentioned turns out to be true, it segues nicely into one of my favourite points: I LOVE it when science "corrects" itself when it finds errors. They ALWAYS get found sooner or later (when they are real). I think its one of its strenghts.

Science (its methodology) is immune to human bias, nationality, race, religion, etc. The berst example I can think of is CERN's LHC> a bunch of amazing apes from all over the planet searching for answers frenetically smashing things up, in the most expensive and ambitious series of experiments ever devised.

Same for the few times that a handful of scientists have been found to have distorted or lied about their research (I only know of a couple of famous cases): because of science's methodology, they will ALWAYS get caught and shamed
That's what is amazing about science! It always AUTOCORRECTS itself.
And when the evidence is good enough, we can change our world view accordingly (i.e., Newton------>Einstein) :dance:
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by cuttime »

FMiguelez wrote: I LOVE it when science "corrects" itself when it finds errors. They ALWAYS get found sooner or later (when they are real). I think its one of its strenghts.
One of my favorites was the faster than light neutrino that turned out to be a loose cable.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/02/ ... no-results
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by mhschmieder »

And yet, humans are fickle, society is evolving... how many actual "constants" can be pumped into a predictive equation, and especially without context of current events (remember how JFK's death left a void that became "right time at the right place" for those lads from Liverpool).
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by daniel.sneed »

Well, FMiguelez, you can call me paranoiac if you want, that's ok for me too. But what is this sentence about, if not music marketing?
"what happens in our brain when we decide to purchase a piece of music when we hear it for the first time?"

To be serious again, if you are interested in music and brain, perhaps you may like to read Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. I have taken much pleasure reading this book. BTW, it gave me some light I was seeking for long, about situations where people were exposed to music in unusual contexts.
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Re: Study sees and predicts people's decisions to buy music.

Post by Gravity Jim »

Cool find, FMiguelez.

Lisa and I have an excellent source of consciousness research: my uncle Robert Buckley, MD. A psychiatrist formerly in private practice, he spent the latter half of his career both as a working ER doctor and administrator at San Francisco's PES (Psychiatric Emergency Services), and is now retired here in Sonoma County, where he runs a small scale farm, raises chickens, and spends many evenings discussing the nature of consciousness with Lisa and I, along with his wife, science teacher and former head of the Berkeley Schools science department Magi Discoe.

Thanks to our close relationship and his uncanny ability to explain super-complicated ideas in simple terms, Lisa and I came to understand a large bit of consciousness theory along these same lines. The ideas that we don't actually make our own choice, the so-called "User Illusion," is something we accepted and began incorporating into our own personalities well over a decade ago.

So, we are acutely aware that when people are exposed to this idea - that you're not actually driving this bus, you're just in a seat with a pretend steering wheel to keep you busy - they are naturally pretty upset by it. The frontbrain has spent your whole life telling you that it was "your" idea to buy that record, it was "you" that played it for all your friend, and that "you" have a relationship with the music in question. Which is all entirely true, in our view from the child's seat. But your consciousness doesn't really run things... it simply needs to believe it runs things. This is an evolutionary development that allows us to possess skills like extreme long-term memory and shared language without going batshit crazy or killing ourselves in despair.

Oh, yeah, this definitely upsets the apple cart, making a mess of a whole bunch of cherished ideas. But the truth is the truth. And simply booing and hissing doesn't make this fact of human consciousness go away.

Don't reject it out of hand. Take this Gordian knot and roll it around in your hands. You may begin to find that all the ideas that cause you anxiety and discomfort arise from beliefs you an no longer hold if you can accept this basic truth.

We are merely great apes with enormous brains. We look like them, we act like them, and our limbic system is no more complicated or developed than a chimpanzee (to test this theory, get ripping drunk and then watch what you do), and that 90% of your brain that you're "not using?" It's working constantly to drive the bus.

And while Oliver Sacks did a fine job of popularizing neurology, and while "Musicophilia" is a fun read, it's pretty much his weakest book in terms of science. To really start getting your mind blown, I'd suggest:

Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal
The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders
Jim Bordner

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