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.

Indeed, many of us suffer from ideological “burn-in”—the unfortunate imprinting of biases from stories and exposure.

“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

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

Quality, it seems, is a necessary but insufficient attribute for success.

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.

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?

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.”

“A reader’s favorite subject is the reader.”