Abstract

Social influence has shown to be incredibly powerful in shaping a consumer’s behaviour. An example of this occurs with the “herding effect”, in which consumers ignore any of their own signals in favour of copying the actions or preferences of the majority. Social influence has been shown to be especially strong in online music consumption, due to the fact that music is highly subjective and can only be ascribed value after it has been experienced; therefore, it is not surprising that strong relationships have been found in research looking at herding effects in music consumption. However, past studies have limited their scope to analyzing the effect across situations, and have so far assumed that the herding effect holds for all consumers, and for all types of music. Therefore, this study looks determine whether there are any potential moderators to the herding effect, such as an individual’s personality or the type of music being consumed. Furthermore, while past studies have looked only at product choice as an outcome variable, this study aims to extend our understanding of the strength of the effect to see if it also impacts consumers’ subsequent evaluations of the consumption experience. Results suggest this effect on the consumption experience does exist, and significant effects are found that suggest online social connectedness and self-construal moderate the impact of the herding effect. These results have implications for marketers in the music industry, and also more generally for anyone looking to understand how personality may moderate social influence effects.