The model worked just as well in describing song download trends as it did in explaining the transmission of disease through populations. They examined how well a classic model of epidemic disease, known as the SIR model, reflected trends in song downloads over time by focusing on the top 1,000 songs downloaded in the UK between 20.
Read this next: TikTok owners set to launch music streaming service The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences, has found that the pattern of music downloads after their release appears to closely resemble epidemic curves for infectious disease.Įlectronica appears to be the most infectious genre of all, according to the research.ĭora Rosati, the study's lead author and a former graduate of McMaster University with a degree in mathematics and statistics, along with her team used a database of nearly 1.4 billion individual song downloads from the now-defunct music streaming service MixRadio. New research has found that music is infectious, and spreads similarly to viruses.
