Communicating and Creating Earworms through Social Media

Abstract

            The objective of this research is to explore the communication of addictive songs that is prevalent in today’s social media channels. This study will first examine compositional components that cause a “stuck song syndrome,” including the lyrics, melodies and music videos. Then, it will analyze the communication of addictive songs in today’s social media channels in order to introduce guidelines regarding the integration of Earworms Method for an effective and successful communication. The methodology of this study includes documentary analysis of 10 online music videos on YouTube selected by 100 participants in a memorization test, focus group discussion with 42 participants (aged 18-34), and in-depth interview with 3 experts. The results of the study will be elaborated using the descriptive analytics approach.
            It is found that the primary distinctive characteristic of an addictive song is its repeated patterns including repeated words in the lyrics, repeated melodies, and music videos that elicited repeated viewings. Overall, five addictive songs’ music videos adopt all three iterative patterns, whereas the other five music videos do not fully use these three patterns but instead opt for different ones. Furthermore, the research discovers that the use of Earworms Method to communicate a song through various online channels can increase song recognition via leveraging social media’s algorithms to repeatedly communicate and display the same message on the audience’s news feeds. In conclusion, even though social media is a driving force behind the audience’s repetitive and frequent message receptions and song recognitions, it still relies upon another important aspect of the song to cause a stuck song syndrome which is its musical components.