Examples are the evolution of harmonic and timbral properties of popular music, the influence of gender and race on chart success, and how technological progress influences cultural diversity, respectively, concentration processes.

It has been recognized that charts, in particular music charts, like the US-based Billboard charts, provide access to the study of an extended range of socio-cultural developments. Here we will show that certain traits of the New York Times best-seller list and the streaming charts compiled on a daily basis by Spotify, a streaming portal, are congruent with the predictions of an information-theoretical theory of human decision-making. Prime candidates are in this regard rankings measuring the economic success of cultural goods, like music albums, books and movies. On a decisively less galactic level, a legitimate question regards the statistics of cultural phenomena produced by large numbers of decisions. Individual preferences would average out when populations are large. At the core of the framework in question, ‘psychohistory’, lies the hypothesis that it could be possible to describe collective decision-making by rigorous laws, regardless of what a specific individual decides to do. Isaac Asimov’s science fiction ‘Foundation’ trilogy is based on the presumption that it may be possible to develop a framework which would allow to model and predict the political and economic development of human societies as such. Further support for information maximization is argued to arise from the comparison of hourly, daily and weekly charts, which allow to gauge the importance of decision times with respect to the chart compilation period.

In this view, humans aim to optimize the information content of the internal representation of the outside world, which is logarithmically compressed.

External factors are less important for consumption-based charts (sales, downloads), which can be explained by a generic theory of decision-making. We find that charts based on the active production of items, like commenting, are more likely to be influenced by external factors, in particular by the 24 h day–night cycle. Here we examine if this observation holds also for (a) music streaming charts (b) book best-seller lists and (c) for social network activity charts, such as Twitter hashtags and the number of comments Reddit postings receive. Traditional music charts have been shown to follow self-organizing principles with regard to the distribution of item lifetimes, the on-chart residence times. Charts are used to measure relative success for a large variety of cultural items.

Personal spotify charts