Exploring patterns in European singles charts

European singles charts are important part of the music industry responsible for creating popularity of songs. After modeling and exploring dynamics of global album sales in previous papers, we investigate patterns of hit singles popularity according to all data (1966-2015) from weekly charts (polls) in 12 Western European countries. The dynamics of building popularity in various national charts is more than the economy because it depends on spread of information. In our research we have shown how countries may be affected by their neighbourhood and influenced by technological era. We have also computed correlations with geographical and cultural distances between countries in analog, digital and Internet era. We have shown that time delay between the single premiere and the peak of popularity has become shorter under the influence of technology and the popularity of songs depends on geographical distances in analog (1966-1987) and Internet (2004-2015) era. On the other hand, cultural distances between nations have influenced the peaks of popularity, but in the Compact Disc era only (1988-2003). We have also indicated the European countries in line with global trends e.g. The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and outsiders like Italy and Spain.Comment: 7p+appendi

Effective judgmental forecasting in the context of fashion products

We study the conditions that influence judgmental forecasting effectiveness when predicting demand in the context of fashion products. Human judgment is of practical importance in this setting. Our goal is to investigate what type of decision support, in particular historical and/or contextual predictors, should be provided to human forecasters to improve their ability to detect and exploit linear and nonlinear cue-criterion relationships in the task environment. Using a field experiment on new product forecasts in the music industry, our analysis reveals that when forecasters are concerned with predictive accuracy and only managerial judgments are employed, providing both types of decision support data is beneficial. However, if judgmental forecasts are combined with a statistical forecast, restricting the decision support provided to human judges to contextual anchors is beneficial. We identify two novel interactions demonstrating that the exploitation of nonlinearities is easiest for human judgment if contextual data are present but historical data are absent. Thus, if the role of human judgment is to detect these nonlinearities (and the linearities are taken care of by some statistical model with which judgments are combined), then a restriction of the decision support provided would make sense. Implications for the theory and practice of building decision support models are discussed

Who is relevant? Exploring fertility relevant social networks

Based on the analysis of qualitative interviews in western Germany we argue that social relationships have a strong impact on individuals´ and couples´ fertility intentions and behavior. We identify relevant others and mechanisms of influences. The core family is an important factor of influences but we are also able to show that social relationships beyond the core family of parents and siblings need to be considered when taking social influence on the family formation of individuals into account.Germany, fertility, influence, social network

Whither Poverty in Great Britain and the United States? The Determinants of Changing Poverty and Whether Work Will Work

We provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of common definitions. We then ask what factors û demographic, economic, or policy û account for the observed changes in poverty in the two nations and what role could policy play in reducing poverty? We find that the forces influencing poverty differ between nations and across absolute and relative poverty measures. Demographic and wage change is a dominant force in both nations. Government benefits reduced relative and absolute poverty considerably in Britain over this period but had little impact in the US. However, policy changes may have significantly increased work in the US, particularly among single parents, whereas in Britain they may have had the reverse effect. The UK government has committed itself to reducing child poverty by half over the next 10 years and to its abolition within 20 years. We conclude that any purely work-based strategy, which doesn't tackle demographics and wage dispersion, may not have a dramatic effect on relative poverty.

Pension Provision and Retirement Saving: Lessons from the United Kingdom

We describe the trajectory of pension reform in the United Kingdom, which has focussed on keeping the cost of public pension programmes down during a period of steady population ageing whilst attempting to maintain an adequate minimum level of income security for low income households in retirement. Instruments for achieving these aims have been to target public benefits on low income households, permitting individuals to opt out of the second tier of the public programme into private retirement accounts, and the use of tax incentives to encourage additional private retirement saving. Frequent reforms to the pension programme raise the question of whether households can make reasonable private retirement saving provision in the light of growing complexity and potential shortcomings in individual decision-making. This paper sheds some light on these issues.pensions, social security, retirement saving

An Economist’s Guide to Digital Music

In this guide, we discuss the impact of digitalization on the music industry. We rely on market and survey data at the international level as well as expert statements from the industry. The guide investigates recent developments in legal and technological protection of digital music and describes new business models as well as consumers' attitude towards music downloads and audio-streaming. We conclude the guide by a discussion of the evolution of the music industry.music, internet, file-sharing, peer-to-peer, piracy, digital rights management, copyright, e-commerce

A Critical-Cultural Analysis Of Evolving Music Technology and Human Communication: Should We Let The Music Do The Talking?

Noted media communication scholar Marshall McLuhan said it best when he famously asserted “the medium is the message.” He continues on, recognizing that “the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale Warren 5 that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (McLuhan 7). One category of mediums it applies best to is music. This interests me, as a communication studies student and as someone who aims to understand the role that human interaction plays in music technology. In my critical cultural analysis, I will be analyzing how different communication studies principles are demonstrated in our motivations and ways we choose to listen to music

How the Democratization of Music Changed the Industry

The music industry has witnessed a rise in democracy in the 21st century, both in terms of how artists write and record their content, and how we as listeners consume it. The growing affordability of music technology over the past ten years has allowed artists to work in the confines of their own homes. Many musicians are now granted the opportunity to build their own fanbase without the help of a label, mainly through music chat channels. As a result, consumers acquire music from a variety of places (Limewire, Napster, and now, Spotify). Corporations have now seemingly convinced customers that Spotify is the best place for acquiring any music one could want. This was thanks to the many innovations in the early 2000s, as well as a group of people who wanted as much music as possible for free. My objective in this thesis is to showcase the trends of the music consumption process, and how it has directly affected the streaming era. File-sharing and the development of the mp3 will be fully explored in relation to the democratization of music. I will gather information through various readings (Michael Ayers’ Cybersounds for example) and interviews with my peers at Salem State University. They’re the ones who grew up in the era of file-sharing. I will also use information from Slate’s Hit Parade podcast about the death of the single. These studies will assist with proving file-sharing’s impact on the industry. With these various sources, I hope to find out who specifically was affected by the looming grasp of the music industry (lower class, media, etc.), as well as the full breadth of the industry’s impact (Kanye West and Theodore Adorno seem to think so). I specifically want to explore Napster’s impact on modern streaming, and how that era affected music democratization. Lastly, I will identify how these developments have influenced the artist’s creative process

VisText: A Benchmark for Semantically Rich Chart Captioning

Captions that describe or explain charts help improve recall and comprehension of the depicted data and provide a more accessible medium for people with visual disabilities. However, current approaches for automatically generating such captions struggle to articulate the perceptual or cognitive features that are the hallmark of charts (e.g., complex trends and patterns). In response, we introduce VisText: a dataset of 12,441 pairs of charts and captions that describe the charts' construction, report key statistics, and identify perceptual and cognitive phenomena. In VisText, a chart is available as three representations: a rasterized image, a backing data table, and a scene graph -- a hierarchical representation of a chart's visual elements akin to a web page's Document Object Model (DOM). To evaluate the impact of VisText, we fine-tune state-of-the-art language models on our chart captioning task and apply prefix-tuning to produce captions that vary the semantic content they convey. Our models generate coherent, semantically rich captions and perform on par with state-of-the-art chart captioning models across machine translation and text generation metrics. Through qualitative analysis, we identify six broad categories of errors that our models make that can inform future work.Comment: Published at ACL 2023, 29 pages, 10 figure