Hit Makers

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.

“Every bit of consumer research we’ve ever done shows only one consistent thing: Radio is the number one driver of sales and the biggest predictor of a song’s success,” says Dave Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen, which tracks music sales and airplay. “You almost invariably see the biggest songs hit radio first, then pick up [in

Audiences like art that gives them the jolt of meaning that often comes from an inkling of recognition.

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.

A book that sells one million copies in a year in the United States is a runaway bestseller—that 99 percent of the country didn’t buy. If ten million U.S. households watch a new show, it’s a smash hit—that 90 percent of households never saw. If fifty million people buy a ticket to see a film, it’s the year’s biggest blockbuster—which more than 80 p

This 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 is the first thesis of the book. Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic—curious to discover new things—and deeply neophobic—afraid of anything that’s too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.

The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all recorded music revenue.

“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

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.”