![Preview of Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/515VNUFQ7PL.jpg)
added by Nicola Lombardi and · updated 5mo ago
added by Nicola Lombardi and · updated 5mo ago
Audiences like art that gives them the jolt of meaning that often comes from an inkling of recognition.
But the point is that every year hundreds of songs won’t become hits, and it will have very little to do with the fact that they weren’t “catchy enough.”
That’s why Simonson and Rosen have named their theory “absolute value.” The Internet, they say, will be a brand-assassinating technology, flooding the world with information and drowning out the signal of advertising for many products.
“For every great song that makes it into the charts and has months of airplay, there are a hundred other songs that are just as good, if not better, which, if sung by the right artist with the right marketing, would be a smash hit,” SoundOut’s Courtier-Dutton said. “It is absolutely, categorically true that there are thousands of songs out there th
... See moreIn just the past thirty years, the number of books published worldwide has sextupled, exceeding three million new titles annually. The number of original scripted television shows and movies has similarly grown by a factor of six since the 1980s in the United States alone. You may add to that teetering pile of unread books, unwatched films, and unf
... See moreThis might be the most important question for every creator and maker in the world: How do you make something new, if most people just like what they know? Is it possible to surprise with familiarity?
This way of predicting tastes by aggregating millions of people’s preferences is known as “collaborative filtering”—collaborative because it takes many users’ inputs, and filtering because it uses the data to narrow down the next thing you want to hear.
Quality, it seems, is a necessary but insufficient attribute for success.
The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all recorded music revenue.
“A reader’s favorite subject is the reader.”