The Shrinking Sweet Spot: How Algorithms, Institutions, and Social Priors Shape Musical Ecosystems

A new paper from arXiv (2604.20873) by Fabio Lokwani Di Matteo and Pier Luigi Sacco tackles why some national music markets sustain rich diversity while others converge on formulaic output. The researchers model musical taste as a learning process rather than a fixed parameter, using the active inference framework from cognitive science. Their sequential choice model shows preferences, information, and consumption environments co-evolve, nesting mechanisms from superstar economics, rational addiction, and Bayesian social learning.

The agent-based simulation generates four key predictions: algorithmic curation suppresses consumption diversity beyond a sharp nonlinear threshold; institutional structure determines winner-take-all intensity through confirmatory cross-system contrasts; cultural capital buffers listeners against homogenization; and high-curation, high-conformity systems collapse supply-side dispersion. The framework is tested against four national music ecosystems: Italy's Festival di Sanremo, Brazil, South Korea, and the UK. The welfare implications are direct: because listeners' preferences adapt to impoverished environments through the learning mechanisms described, revealed preference analysis cannot reliably evaluate cultural market outcomes.