The Song Machine: How to Make a Hit

Put another way, the real “clout” is your musical talent.

Starting in the 1980s, a different attitude prevailed. “Why choose?” asked many members of the up-and-coming generation. Why couldn’t a musician range freely through these riches, mixing and matching as passing moods dictated?

But our charter changed for a little while. We were trying to make sense of Jimmy’s theory of the five-second read: if a song doesn’t grab you within that short span, it’s not going to grab you at all.

Now the payment streams reversed: instead of charging astronomical licensing fees, record companies paid DJs to play particular songs.* The first type of mistake businesses often make is that they misjudge the relationship between two products, seeing them as substitutes when they are, in fact, complements. In hindsight, we see things more clearly,