# Conformity bias in the cultural transmission of music sampling traditions

## TL;DR

This study investigates how conformity bias influences the cultural transmission of music sampling traditions over three decades, revealing that population-level sampling patterns align more with conformity than novelty bias.

## Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that conformity bias, rather than novelty bias, shapes the evolution of music sampling traditions using longitudinal data and agent-based simulations.

## Key findings

- Sampling patterns are consistent with conformity bias.
- Turn-over rates of popular samples differ from neutral evolution.
- Population-level transmission is driven by conformity bias.

## Abstract

One of the fundamental questions of cultural evolutionary research is how individual-level processes scale up to generate population-level patterns. Previous studies in music have revealed that frequency-based bias (e.g. conformity and novelty) drives large-scale cultural diversity in different ways across domains and levels of analysis. Music sampling is an ideal research model for this process because samples are known to be culturally transmitted between collaborating artists, and sampling events are reliably documented in online databases. The aim of the current study was to determine whether frequency-based bias has played a role in the cultural transmission of music sampling traditions, using a longitudinal dataset of sampling events across three decades. Firstly, we assessed whether turn-over rates of popular samples differ from those expected under neutral evolution. Next, we used agent-based simulations in an approximate Bayesian computation framework to infer what level of frequency-based bias likely generated the observed data. Despite anecdotal evidence of novelty bias, we found that sampling patterns at the population-level are most consistent with conformity bias.