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.

In just the past thirty years, the number of books published worldwide has sextupled, exceeding three million new titles annually. The number of original scripted television shows and movies has similarly grown by a factor of six since the 1980s in the United States alone. You may add to that teetering pile of unread books, unwatched films, and unf

“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

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

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.

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?

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