How Our Brains Decide When to Trust
Trust is the enabler of global business — without it, most market transactions would be impossible....
Steereo is a music platform that exposes rideshare patrons to new music. The platform tracks rider interactions with music, identifying what they listen to and for how long. Steereo challenged us to predict songs that would become hits before they were released. Because Immersion captures how much the brain values an experience, we were confident we could predict at least some hits, but we had no idea how accurate our predictions would be.
We measured immersion while 21 people listened to the first minute of seven songs from seven artists in Steereo’s Artists in Residence Program. The songs had not been released so they were new to all participants. The order of songs was varied during testing. Listeners were also asked to rate how much they liked the song.
The songs were released a month later on Steereo's platform to rideshare providers across the United States. The Steereo app lets riders skip songs or change stations and Steereo shared these data with us.
We also tracked Spotify song streams and followers for the artists. As another measure of market impact, we tracked Shazam lookups for the artists and songs.
Accuracy in predicting Spotify streams
Accuracy in predicting Shazam lookups
Accuracy in predicting song completions
Immersion predicted the number of Spotify streams one month after song release with 92% accuracy and Shazam lookups with 72% accuracy. Our analysis showed that a 10% increase in peak immersion will produce nearly 5,000 more streams of the song on Spotify and 8.5% more Shazam lookups.
Immersion also predicted song completions by Steereo rideshare listeners with 71% accuracy. The Immersion Neuroscience platform reports the number of immersion super-fans for an experience and this predicted an artists' Spotify followers with 67% accuracy.
At the same time, in-car listens predicted Spotify streams by 86%, saves by 94%, and followers by 66%. This shows that Steereo audiences are a leading indicator of how well songs will perform in market. On the other hand, self-reported "liking" of a song had no ability to predict Spotify streams.
Trust is the enabler of global business — without it, most market transactions would be impossible....