« Weekly MP3 (10/6/07): Vinson Valega Quartet - "Talk Time" | Main | Weekly MP3 (10/26/07): Vinson Valega Quartet - "This is What Democracy Sounds Like" »

In a fascinating article back in April in the NY Times, author Duncan Watts (Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age) details research into how certain songs or other items in pop culture catch on and become hits:

As anyone who follows the business of culture is aware, the profits of cultural industries depend disproportionately on the occasional outsize success - a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist - to offset the many investments that fail dismally. What may be less clear to casual observers is why professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. How could it be that industry executives rejected, passed over or even disparaged smash hits like "Star Wars," "Harry Potter" and the Beatles, even as many of their most confident bets turned out to be flops?

Simple. Nobody knows anything. Or to put it in the postive: Everybody knows Jack-shit! Hollywood is the perfect example of this, where producers who score a huge hit think they actually know what good taste is but then spend the rest of their career trying to replicate that one success.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will. And indeed that's pretty much what they try to do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren't studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audience.

Or it could be something completely different:

People tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called "cumulative advantage," or the "rich get richer" effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors - a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous "butterfly effect" from chaos theory.

Is it possible to predict which book or movie or song is going to be successful? We like to think so, although the research shows how difficult it is to predict the future:

Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with our intuitions. Because it is always possible, after the fact, to come up with a story about why things worked out the way they did - that the first "Harry Potter" really was a brilliant book, even if the eight publishers who rejected it didn't know that at the time - our belief in determinism is rarely shaken, no matter how often we are surprised. But just because we now know that something happened doesn't imply that we could have known it was going to happen at the time, even in principle, because at the time, it wasn't necessarily going to happen at all.

The whole phenomenon of predicting hits is actually quite impossible, because what becomes popular is dependent on whether other consumers of culture like the work:

Even if you think most people are tasteless or ignorant, it's natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow "better," at least in the democratic sense of a competitive market, than their unsuccessful counterparts, that Norah Jones and Madonna deserve to be as successful as they are if only because "that's what the market wanted." What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market "wants" at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply "reveals" what people wanted all along. In such a world, in fact, the question "Why did X succeed?" may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss's surprise best seller, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," who, when asked to explain its success, replied that "it sold well because lots of people bought it."

It's fascinating to think of popular culture this way, since it makes the game of predicting hits seem completely random. Perhaps there's another Justine Timberlake in an alternative universe who's making completely different music over there.

Read the entire article for the complete picture...

I think there is a fundamental contradiction in the assumptions behind this kind of research. On one hand, the holy grail is assumed to be "predicting success," where success stands for the megahit (the Timberlake perplex).

To quote the article: profits of cultural industries depend on outsize success - a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist - to offset the many investments that fail dismally (end quote)

Yet few question how focusing on megahits distorts our very understanding of what makes art and culture valuable.

(Of course, it's also true that megahit dynamics sometimes work in similar ways in niche cultures like jazz or academia or graffiti, for example, with its celebrities that only insiders know. But the values are nevertheless different, and the fact that success is defined differently produces an alternative cultural world that has an important place in the world.)

On the other hand, these researchers give lip service to the idea that the other goal is the democratic workings of the market to bring the best quality to the top.

To quote the article: it's natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow "better," at least in the democratic sense of a competitive market, than their unsuccessful counterparts, (end quote)

But the research still tends to view success in terms of massive sales. To give a movie or an album a chance of megahit status depends on limited offerings and flooding of the market. Commercial radio sells CDs, but it sucks to listen to.

This is a v. different range of dynamics compared what is required to bring out the best in other fields (e.g., specialized committed audiences and peer communities that provide constructive feedback and support).

The researchers in this vein always say they want it both ways, but they don't question the vacuous definition of success that distorts the values of whole process from the start.

The real question, it seems to me, is not how you create more megahits, nor even, how you bring the best quality work to bubble to the top to become megahits. Rather, the goal should be to show how alternative creative worlds can be sustaining, and ultimately more satisfying, than the mindless blockbuster fare that clogs the system.

It reminds me of the Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker about the team that developed a formula for predicting hit movies: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact6

For me the question is not whether we can, or cannot, predict megahits. In some sense, these predictor types *do* predict hits, just at a rate of 1 in 10 (for music). The underlying mistake, however, is to assume that hits are the goal. At least, that's my two cents.

Name (required)
Email
Website
Remember personal info? Yes   No
Comments

home | music | democracy | earth | money | projects | about | contact

Site design by Matthew Fries | © 2003-23 Consilience Productions. All Rights Reserved.
Consilience Productions, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
All contributions are fully tax deductible.