"By observing how popular the same song became in different worlds, we could measure directly how much of its success can be attributed to some intrinsic “quality,” and how much results from random chance. We found that although, on average, good songs do better than bad songs, the random fluctuations arising from social influence were larger than those arising from differences in quality."
The Myth of Common Sense: Why The Social World Is Less Obvious Than It Seems « Freakonomics
