A million choices, and we still pick the same things

Choice has become one of the internet’s great extravagances. Spotify carries more music than anyone could hear in a lifetime. Booking platforms let travelers sift through hundreds of places to stay in a single city, while restaurant apps can produce dozens of possibilities for dinner before anyone has decided what they are hungry for. 

The old problem of finding enough options has, in many corners of life, been replaced by the problem of choosing among them.

Yet abundance has acquired an intriguing companion. The same restaurants climb recommendation lists, the same songs dominate charts and independent coffee shops separated by thousands of kilometers can be surprisingly difficult to tell apart. A March 2026 study published in the peer-reviewed journal City, Culture and Society found a narrow range of recurring design features across independent cafés, even as those businesses emphasized their individuality and local character.

Digital platforms have not simply increased choice. They have also become the machinery for sorting it, using ratings, recommendations and the behavior of previous customers. When almost everything is available, what determines what people actually choose?

When popularity becomes persuasive

Long before TikTok could turn a restaurant into a destination overnight, three researchers built a miniature cultural market to see what happened when people knew what everyone else was choosing.

The 2006 Science study by Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts presented 14,341 participants with 48 songs by unfamiliar bands, which they could listen to, rate and download. In one, participants made their choices independently. In the others, they could see how many times previous participants had downloaded each song. Some of those social-influence groups also saw the songs ranked from most to least downloaded.

When participants could see other listeners’ choices, downloads became more concentrated among fewer songs. The more social information they received, the greater the inequality between successful and unsuccessful tracks.

Twenty years later, the signals tested in that experiment have become routine features of digital life. A hotel now arrives with thousands of ratings, a restaurant with its review count and a song with evidence that millions of others have already played it. More choice has therefore arrived alongside far more information about everybody else’s choices.

Who chooses the next song?

Music streaming offers a particularly clear version of the abundance problem because its catalogues are far larger than any listener could meaningfully browse. Recommendation systems provide a way through them, assembling playlists, and suggesting artists from a universe of available music that would otherwise be impossible to survey.

But recommendations do not always concentrate attention on what is already popular. A June 2026 study by Korea University Business School researchers Hyeonyeong Shim and Dongyeon Kim examined Spotify’s AI Playlist, which generates playlists from users’ descriptions of what they want.

After the feature became available, the researchers found a shift in listening among the tracks they studied. Higher-ranked tracks lost streams while lower-ranked tracks gained them. AI Playlist also increased the likelihood that previously unstreamed tracks would begin receiving streams and that newly discovered tracks would continue to be played.

The finding complicates the usual anxiety about recommendation systems. Algorithms can reinforce popularity, but they can also make the obscure easier to find.

What matters, then, is how people are guided through the abundance in front of them. A ranking built around popularity, a playlist based on previous listening and a tool responding to a detailed prompt can lead consumers through the same catalogue in very different directions

When “local” starts looking familiar

Sameness is not confined to what people click, stream, or buy online. It can also appear in places built around the promise of something different.

Independent coffee shops have built much of their appeal around distinction. Unlike a multinational chain designed to reproduce a recognizable experience across cities, the independent café can sell a sense of place alongside the espresso. 

Researchers Kelly Gregg, Jeffrey Nathaniel Parker, Conrad Kickert and Ian Trivers became interested in what happened when many of those businesses began drawing on a remarkably similar visual vocabulary. Their March 2026 study in City, Culture and Society examined third-wave coffee shops in the United States and Canada through a pilot study of 50 establishments and two online surveys of more than 140 participants.

Participants repeatedly identified the same features in photographs of different cafés, including reclaimed wood, exposed brick, chalkboard signs, vintage or repurposed furniture and local artwork. Tattoos, piercings and beards on baristas also appeared among the characteristics associated with the coffee-shop type.

Locating the cafés proved much more difficult. Participants struggled to identify the city from the interior, despite drawing conclusions about the likely clientele and the quality and price of its coffee.

The researchers argue that these recurring features have effectively created a recognizable brand without a company controlling it, with businesses signaling independence through many of the same design choices.

The irony is hard to miss. Standardization once meant knowing that a familiar logo would bring the same experience in another city. The third-wave café dispensed with the logo and kept some of the recognizability.

More choice, smaller maps

More choice, it turns out, does not necessarily mean more varied choices. The internet has vastly expanded what is available while also making popularity more visible and recommendations more influential. Sometimes those tools lead people toward the crowd. Sometimes, as Spotify’s AI Playlist suggests, they help people escape it.

The paradox lies in having both at once. An obscure song or independent café has never been easier to find. Neither has the song everyone is playing, the hotel everyone is booking, or the aesthetic everyone recognizes.

Abundance has widened the field without removing the pull of other people’s choices. The age of abundance has not eliminated taste. It has given taste an enormous new playground, then handed everyone a map showing where the other people are.