The Group Behaviour Fallacy or Why Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Rule

I find it endlessly fascinating how pundits and commentators ascribe grand plans to groups of people who have little in common and no direct lines of communication. If two large multinationals set the same price in the same week, that's probably collusion, but six million voters probably weren't operating in the full knowledge of how each other planned to order their ballot sheets. It's absurd to suggest that Australian voters wanted John Howard to have control of the Australian Senate - control of the upper house is contingent on so many factors all anyone can know is that they'd rather one lot than another had more people there - but people do it nonetheless.

The same kind of faulty analysis seems to be occurring in the critical praise/backlash that newspapers and bloggers are jumping onto. The Pitchfork Effect, as it's called, seems to suggest that a positive review from pitchforkmedia immediately guarantees critical praise, commercial success and then a lot of snooty indie people saying that they never liked you anyway. This concept, while it fills column inches at the Guardian and excuses endless cover stories about the Arctic Monkeys, has a significiant hole in it.

Pitchfork doesn't set the agenda in a vacuum. It's just one of a number of influential websites and blogs that praise well-known and little-known music. While it may have got onto a band like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah early on, Stylus magazine published its glowing review a day earlier and other positive reviews arrived within a week. Each one of the "early adopters" tends to operate independently, so the hype really only gets started once a bunch of unrelated reviewers jumps on a CD - i.e. when it's awesome. Pitchfork alone can't manufacture hype, as any number of 9.0+ reviews of albums that sold peanuts will attest.

However, I do think a glowing endorsement from a big target zine like the 'fork is asking for a backlash against a band. Usually from blogger kids who wish they wrote for a magazine. A quick look at the slander that big name Stylus reviewers get on their message boards will show that the popularity of these magazines is causing a backlash all of its own. And who wants people to think they only like band because some magazine told them to?

If it's true that rock critics are frustrated musicians, it's probably equally true that the myspace bloggers who hate on music zines are frustrated rock critics.

Full disclosure: The writer of this blog is a columnist for the stypod, the Stylus Magazine mp3 blog. He's not well known enough for anyone to have ever criticised his work or championing of a band.

Categories: Indie
Tags: pitchfork-effect; snobbery; clap-your-hands-say-yeah; punk-ass-kids