Musical tastes in the Web 2.0: the importance of network dynamics

Information and communication technologies and the technologies of Web 2.0 have brought a revolution that acts as a prelude of creative destruction for the incumbents in most sectors of the economy. One of the most affected sectors is that of the music industry. After a brief discussion of the cultural industries and the significance of the music industry, the paper turns to theoretical approaches to Social Networks and their analysis, and especially the ways in which social influence has traditionally been conceptualised. It then offers an examination of Salganik and Watts' web-based experiments for the study of collective social dynamics in cultural markets, and proposes a new experimental design for the examination of the potentially novel forms of influence developing in the ecology of the Web 2.0.