On the Causal Relationship Between Music Virality and Success

Abstract

Songs going viral is not a new phenomenon in the music industry. Still, this phenomenon has reached new heights with the popularization of the Web and social platforms, which allow songs to achieve worldwide hit status almost instantly. Although interconnected, musical virality and commercial success are distinct concepts, and platforms such as TikTok have had significant power in amplifying music virality and creating successful hits. In this work, we analyze the temporal connection between musical virality and success. Specifically, our goal is to investigate the causal relationship between such concepts. By using global chart data from streaming platforms, we model time series to represent songs’ viral and success evolution over time and then perform two distinct analyses over them. First, we use Granger Causality to assess whether musical virality can forecast success and vice versa. Then we address the causal discovery task to qualitatively uncover the underlying causal relationships between them. The results suggest there is potential for using music virality to forecast future success and vice versa, although this does not apply to all songs. Despite their symbiotic relationship influenced by social platforms, our findings reinforce the contrast between music virality and success as different facets of music popularity.