The Song Machine: How to Make a Hit

There's a reason hit songs offer guilty pleasure―they're designed that way.Over the last two decades a new type of hit song has emerged, one that is almost inescapably catchy. Pop songs have always had a "hook," but today’s songs bristle with them: a hook every seven seconds is the rule. Painstakingly crafted to tweak the brain's delight in melody,... See more

The music industry is one that has never ceased to have a need(s) for revamping and improvement. It is interesting to see that Goldberg, and I am sure many others, had the vision for a better future back then. Today, we are still grappling with ways to allocate more resources to music creators and incentivize fans but is not an easy task.

The original version of Discover Weekly was supposed to include only songs that users had never listened to before. But in its first internal test at Spotify, a bug in the algorithm let through songs that users had already heard. “Everyone reported it as a bug, and we fixed it so that every single song was totally new,” Ogle told me.But after Ogle’... See more