Hit Makers

hotelier Ian Schrager calls it “one plus one equals three.” You build something most people will hate but a few people love—and love enough to tell their friends about. For a podcast, that means having as clear a picture about your topic area, point of view, and ideal listener (yes, listener—singular) as you possibly can, and making the podcast tha

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Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.

There is an overload of music. 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Over 20% of those don’t get streamed even once. The ubiquitous access to almost every piece of recorded music in history has led to a paradox of choice, promoting passive and playlist-driven music consumption and creating winner-take-all effects for the biggest artists.

To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar