Rebecca Black a Network Phenomenon?

For a quick preface, while this doesn't relate directly to what we're studying at the moment, it does have some interesting implication for the some of the past studies we've looked at, specifically degree distribution and power law networks.

In the past week or so a new music video sensation has been making waves on the internet (and even on television as well): Rebecca Black's video for her solo "Friday" from the Ark Music Factory has millions of views on Youtube and over a million downloads with numbers rising as we speak. The song and video are notable not for their quality but for their lack of quality: here is a link if you think your ears can take it and haven't heard it yet. Lyrical gems include "Yesterday was Thursday/Today is Friday" and "Partyin' partyin'/yeah yeah." Dozens of parody videos have sprung up ranging from songs about Saturday and Thursday to songs about specific video games.

Clearly, "Friday" is very highly ranked if we were to rank modern pop songs-yet its notoriety is rooted only indirectly in its quality. This further confirms the hypotheses that exposure relies on network connections (rumor has it her parents paid the Ark Music Factory to produce and host the video) and sheer luck. This also suggests that there may be a U-shaped distribution between popularity or exposure to a certain media item and its quality with people being more likely to know about something if it's extremely bad or extremely good. For a list of other "So Bad It's Good" feel free to see this site's list. Whether for good or ill, increased fluidity of information through networks has made it easier for very bad things to get quick exposure just as much as it has eased the ability to find diamonds in the rough.