How does our society appreciate the uniqueness of cultural products? This fundamental puzzle has intrigued scholars in many fields, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, and marketing. It has been theorized that cultural products that balance familiarity and novelty are more likely to become popular. However, a cultural product's novelty is typically multifaceted. This paper uses songs as a case study to study the multiple facets of uniqueness and their relationship with success. We first unpack the multiple facets of a song's novelty or uniqueness and, next, measure its impact on a song's popularity. We employ a series of statistical models to study the relationship between a song's popularity and novelty associated with its lyrics, chord progressions, or audio properties. Our analyses performed on a dataset of over fifty thousand songs find a consistently negative association between all types of song novelty and popularity. Overall we found a song's lyrics uniqueness to have the most significant association with its popularity. However, audio uniqueness was the strongest predictor of a song's popularity, conditional on the song's genre. We further found the theme and repetitiveness of a song's lyrics to mediate the relationship between the song's popularity and novelty. Broadly, our results contradict the "optimal distinctiveness theory" (balance between novelty and familiarity) and call for an investigation into the multiple dimensions along which a cultural product's uniqueness could manifest.

翻译：我们的社会如何欣赏文化产品的独特性？这一基本谜题一直吸引着心理学、社会学、人类学和市场营销等多个领域的学者。理论认为，在熟悉性与新颖性之间取得平衡的文化产品更有可能流行起来。然而，文化产品的新颖性通常是多方面的。本文以歌曲为案例，研究独特性的多个方面及其与成功的关系。我们首先拆解歌曲新颖性或独特性的多种维度，接着衡量其对歌曲流行度的影响。我们采用一系列统计模型，研究歌曲的流行度与其歌词、和弦进行或音频属性的新颖性之间的关系。通过对超过五万首歌曲的数据集进行分析，我们发现所有类型的歌曲新颖性与流行度之间始终存在负相关。总体而言，歌词独特性与歌曲流行度的关联最为显著。然而，在控制歌曲流派的情况下，音频独特性是预测歌曲流行度最强的因素。我们进一步发现，歌词的主题和重复性在歌曲流行度与新颖性之间起到中介作用。广泛而言，我们的结果与“最优独特性理论”（新颖性与熟悉性之间的平衡）相矛盾，并呼吁对文化产品独特性可能展现的多个维度进行深入研究。