Audience Judgments as the Potential Missing Link Between Expert Judgments and Audience Appeal: An Illustration Based on Musical Recordings of “My Funny Valentine”

Previous research on the arts, entertainment, and other cultural objects has found, at most, a weak link between expert judgments of aesthetic excellence and audience appeal to nonexpert consumers. However, this tendency for audience appeal only weakly to reflect expert judgments of excellence raises the question of how this fragile relationship might be mediated by audience judgments of excellence. As the first study to examine the potential intervening role of audience judgments, the present article investigates the links between expert judgments, audience judgments, and audience appeal in an illustrative case based on 200 recordings of the song “My Funny Valentine.” The results support a scenario in which audience appeal is weakly related to expert judgments through the hitherto neglected intervening role of audience judgments so as to suggest refinements in our approaches to marketing entertainment, the arts, or other cultural offerings, as well as various consumer services, durables, or nondurables.