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Music consumption at the dawn of the music industry: the rise of a cultural fad

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Abstract

This paper discusses the extent to which sociodemographic characteristics of consumers and their past consumption are less effective in explaining the decision of purchasing a cultural good than the characteristics of the product itself, which allow for imitative behaviors and are at the basis of distinction. While the former approaches are well documented in the literature, the latter refers to Bourdieu’s idea of objectified cultural capital, which has been revisited and empirically explored. Because the various causal effects interact with each other, this paper tests a theoretical model which matches individual characteristics of the consumer with the properties of the cultural product. Specifically, we discussed the emergence of a new version of a cultural good, which is able to broaden the dimension of the market by gaining rapid success in its audience. This diffusion pattern is a quite rare event, but disruptive for the market and extremely profitable for the producer. The authors label this occurrence a disruptive cultural fad and try to understand the determinants of its adoption. The hypotheses of the model are tested on a unique dataset of microdata of purchasing transactions in Milan in the early nineteenth century, when the music by Gioachino Rossini emerged as a disruptive cultural fad at the dawn of the music industry. Results show that key features of a successful disruptive cultural fad are the role of some specific patterns of personal past consumption, the capabilities of generating positive network externalities in the consumption, and, surprisingly, the lack of negative ones due to any possible hip or snob effect.

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Notes

  1. Gioachino Antonio Rossini (Pesaro 1792–Parigi 1868), Italian composer. His work has ranged across many genres, but he is best remembered as one of the greatest opera writers in history, the famous author of pieces including La gazza ladra, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Guillame Tell.

  2. Departing from an extensive analysis of the Ricordi Historic Archive and of sources concerning music production in the nineteenth century, Baia Curioni (2011) has drawn the history of this family and of the relative music business in Milan and Italy.

  3. Baia Curioni (2011) stressed that the music industry at the beginning of the nineteenth century tries to shift to an industrial mode of production in Naples and Venice, but after Napoleon’s time, this attempt succeeds only in Milan, which is going to become the capital of the music publishing in northern Italy (Baia Curioni 2011, p. 47). Already in 1825, Ricordi, which owned in its catalogue titles of 2,200 works, thus certainly more than its competitors, set the premises of its further success, since its business is not only concentrated in Milan but includes different Italian states and European capitals (Baia Curioni 2011, p. 51).

  4. Bonifazio Asioli (Correggio 1769–1832), Italian composer. In 1808, he was appointed Director of the newly formed “Royal Conservatory of Music in Milan,” the current "Conservatory Giuseppe Verdi." He also wrote treatises on music theory and teaching manuals.

  5. Giuseppe Saverio Raffaele Mercadante (Altamura 1795–Napoli 1870), Italian composer. He was influenced by Rossini and somehow he was anticipating Verdi‘s theater.

  6. Salvatore Viganò (Napoli 1769–Milano 1821), Italian ballet dancer, choreographer, and composer.

  7. Johann Simon Mayr (Mendorf 1763–Bergamo 1845), German composer and music teacher.

  8. The average marginal effect has been calculated by computing the marginal effect and the confidence interval at each quantile and by calculating the mean. Stata DO file is available on request.

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Acknowledgment

The authors are grateful to Prof. Baia Curioni, Laura Forti, and to the partecipants to the ACEI conference 2010 in Copenhagen. We are in debt with Nicoletta Corrocher, Andrè Lorentz, and Arianna Martinelli for their valuable discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Statistics “Cognetti de Martiis”, University of Turin, Lungo Dora, 100A, 10153, Turin, Italy

    Marco Guerzoni

  2. Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Scharnhorststrasse 1, 21335, Lüneburg, Germany

    Massimiliano Nuccio

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  1. Marco Guerzoni
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Correspondence to Marco Guerzoni.

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Guerzoni, M., Nuccio, M. Music consumption at the dawn of the music industry: the rise of a cultural fad. J Cult Econ 38, 145–171 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-013-9205-y

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