Agent-based modelling of the global phonographic market

Based on empirical properties of the global phonographic market, we propose a simple epidemiological model of innovation spread on a network whose structure reflects the structure of the real-world market. The global phonographic market consists of the national markets of various size and mutual interconnections. In the model, we assume that the national markets are the subnetworks that have a scale-free structure achieved by the preferential attachment construction with a node hierarchy and binary edges, while the global market is a complete, directed, weighted network of these subnetworks treated as nodes with the edges representing the cultural and geographical proximity of the national markets. “Viruses” with a defined strength or aggressiveness occur independently at one of the nodes of a selected subnetwork and correspond to a piece of music that has been released by an artist somewhere in the world. We study the virus dynamics set by varying parameter values and observe a variety of phenomena including local and global pandemics and the existence of an epidemic threshold in the subnetworks. Apart from studying the model, we also present some results on empirical data from the European and the U.K. phonographic markets, which are then utilized in the model construction.