Diffusion paths between product life-cycles in the European phonographic market

We have investigated the product life-cycles of almost 17 000 hit singles having appeared on the 12 biggest national phonographic markets in Europe including: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. We have considered weekly singles charts from the last 50 years (1966-2015) in each country. We analyzed the spread of hit singles popularity (chart topping) as an epidemiological process, taking place in various European countries. Popularity of the hit singles is contagious in the sense of moving from one country to another. Thus, we consider time delays between the initial hit single release and reaching the highest position on consecutive national singles charts. We create a directed network of countries, this network representing the transmission of the hit singles popularity between countries. This is obtained by simulating the most likely paths and picking up the most frequent links. A country of initial hit single release is considered as a source of infection. Our algorithm builds up the spanning trees by attaching new nodes. The probability of attachment depends on infectivity of previous nodes from the tree corresponding to their: 1) market size; 2) distance in time between the new node and the potential spreaders. Thus, we obtain a network of popularity spread with: a hub – the UK, a bridge – the Netherlands, and outliers – Italy and Spain. We have found a characteristic topology of hit singles popularity spread. On the top of this, the network of popularity spread has some typical properties of complex networks.