Unless you’re in the music industry (or shopping for a music venue to attend), mostly what this does is restructures how we think about information flow. Instead of one or two big centers, from now on there will likely be a lot of specialized nodes that may or may not be rooted in a geographic area. Unless you were actually hoping that New Brunswick* (or New York or Berlin) is really the thought control center of the universe, this is good news because it means less central control of public opinion. (I think so, anyway–it’s early, and I haven’t had any coffee.)

(*Inside joke for liberal arts majors, sorry science guys.)

What is interesting about their paper is some smart and innovative ways to parse the data available. Also, they are clear about at least this limitation to their research:

“…we should stress that our results reflect a work in progress. For example, a relationship can be statistically significant but at the same time have a very small magnitude. We would be more confident of our results if we could demonstrate that the model that we create is meaningfully predictive. That is, given our model of leader-follower relationships among cities, and given a record of past listening behavior, we should be able to predict the changes in listening behavior that will occur in the near-term future better than a reasonable baseline predictor. We have not yet demonstrated that our models have this predictive power, although we plan to attempt this validation in future work.”