Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

The power of well-disguised familiarity goes far beyond film. It’s a political essay that expresses, with new and thrilling clarity, an idea that readers thought but never verbalized. It’s a television show that introduces an alien world, yet with characters so recognizable that viewers feel as if they’re wearing their skin. It’s a piece of art that dazzles with a new form and yet offers a jolt of meaning. In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an “aesthetic aha.”

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.

Content might be king, but distribution is the kingdom.

Scarcity has yielded to abundance. The concert hall is the Internet, the instruments are cheap, and anybody can write their own symphony. The future of hits will be democratic, chaotic, and unequal. Millions will compete for attention, a happy few will go big, and a microscopic minority will get fantastically rich.

The living room couch replaced the movie theater seat as the number of movie tickets bought per adult fell from about twenty-five in 1950 to four in 2015.

In 2012, for the first time ever, Americans spent more time interacting with digital devices like their laptops and phones than with television.

In the big picture, the world’s attention is shifting from content that is infrequent, big, and broadcast (i.e., millions of people going to the movies once a week) to content that is frequent, small, and social (i.e., billions of people looking at social media feeds on their own glass-and-pixel displays every few minutes).

people tend to gravitate toward the familiar, and technology shapes these familiarities.

A paper map that is the exact size of the empire it describes is “Useless,” because a map is only of service if it is small enough for somebody to hold and read it. The world is complex. But all meaning comes from wise simplification.

Cutting had a theory: Gustave Caillebotte’s death helped to create the impressionist canon. His bequest to the French state created the frame through which contemporary and future art fans viewed impressionism. Art historians focused on the Caillebotte Seven, which bestowed prestige on their works, to the exclusion of others. The paintings of the Caillebotte Seven hung more prominently in galleries, sold for greater sums of money to private collectors, were valued more by art connoisseurs, were printed in more art anthologies, and were dissected by more art history students, who grew into the next generation’s art mavens, eager to pass on the Caillebotte Seven’s inherited fame.1 Cutting had another theory: The fact that Caillebotte’s bequest shaped the impressionist canon spoke to something deep and universal about media, entertainment, and popularity. People prefer paintings that they’ve seen before. Audiences like art that gives them the jolt of meaning that often comes from an inkling of recognition.

People simply liked whatever shapes and words they saw the most. Their preference was for familiarity.

This discovery is known as the “mere exposure effect,” or just the “exposure effect,” and it is one of the sturdiest findings in modern psychology. People don’t just prefer friends over strangers or familiar smells over unfamiliar odors. Across hundreds of studies and metastudies, subjects around the world prefer familiar shapes, landscapes, consumer goods, songs, and human voices. People are even partial to the most familiar version of the thing they should know best in the world: their own faces. The human face is slightly asymmetric, which means that a photograph captures a slightly different face than a mirror. People sometimes wince when they see photographs of themselves, and several studies show people prefer the face that they glimpse in a reflection. Does a glassy surface reveal your countenance at its objectively most beautiful? Probably not. It’s just the face you like, because you’re used to seeing it that way. The preference for familiarity is so universal that some think it must be written into our genetic code from back when our ancestors trawled the savanna. The evolutionary explanation for the exposure effect is simple: If you recognize an animal or plant, then it hasn’t killed you yet.

Same with one's own voice

When it comes to looks, average is truly beautiful. Several studies using computer simulations have shown that blending many faces of the same gender creates a countenance more attractive than its individuals. If you blend a lot of extremely good-looking people together, the composite is even more bewitching. What’s so beautiful about an average face? Scientists aren’t quite sure. Perhaps it’s evolutionary, and a face-of-many-faces suggests genetic diversity. In any case, the appeal is universal and perhaps even innate. In studies of adults and children, based in China and throughout Europe and the United States, the most average faces are judged to be the most attractive.3

In the final analysis, beauty does not reside in forms, or cosmic ratios, or even in the standard-issue wiring of humans’ minds, hearts, and guts. It exists in the interplay between the world and people—which is to say, in life. People adapt. To paraphrase Tennyson, they are the sum of all they have met. They are born average and die unique.

If public museums have been, for several hundred years, the most important real estate in art, then radio has been the public museum of pop music, the great hallway of mass exposure. Airplay was so critical to building popularity for new music in the mid-twentieth century that music labels developed elaborate “payola” schemes to directly pay radio stations to play their songs. Even into this century, omnipresent airplay is critical to make a hit. “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,”

Public exposure on radio can be even more powerful than “mere” exposure, because a song’s presence on a Top 40 station offers other cues about its quality, like the sense that tastemakers and other listeners have already heard and endorsed it.

Even at the dawn of the American music business, to make a song a hit, a memorable melody was secondary to an ingenious marketing campaign. “In Tin Pan Alley, what publishers understood was that no matter how clever, how catchy, how timely a song, its [success] depended on its system of distribution,” music historian David Suisman wrote in Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music.

Tin Pan Alley’s pluggers gave way to radio, and now radio is giving way to new forms of distribution that are more open, equal, and unpredictable.

It would be nice to think that in a cultural market like music, quality is everything, and each number-one hit is also the best-in-class. Plus, it seems awfully hard to prove otherwise. How do you demonstrate that a song nobody has heard of is “better” than the most popular song in the country? You would need something crazy: a parallel universe to compare where thousands of people have listened to the same songs and come to different conclusions without the power of marketing. In fact, that parallel universe exists. Music labels consult it all the time. It is the universe of HitPredictor and SoundOut, online song-testing companies that ask thousands of people to evaluate the catchiness of new songs before the general population has formed an opinion about them.

The best-performing recording in SoundOut history was Adele’s sophomore album, 21, which included three worldwide number one hits and won the 2012 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. “Every song on the 21 album scored above an 80,” SoundOut founder and CEO David Courtier-Dutton told me in late 2015. “We’ve never seen that before, and we’ve never seen it since.”

But look back at the top hits of late 2015: Songs in the 70s routinely beat dozens, if not hundreds, of songs that scored in the 80s and 90s. Above a certain level, catchiness doesn’t make a song a monster hit. Exposure does.

There are simply too many “good-enough” songs for every worthy hook to become a bona fide hit. Quality, it seems, is a necessary but insufficient attribute for success.

In a world of scarce media—just one public French museum, or just three local radio stations—popularity is more top-down. Hits are easier to control and easier to predict.

Every political campaign is a media organization. Political campaigns spend half their money on advertising. Elected representatives spent 70 percent of their time engaged in what any sane person would recognize as telemarketing—directly

The most successful way for a president to shape public opinion is to speak directly to voters.

Trump

The president is shrinking, and so is the political party. For the past half century, the best predictor of a political candidate’s electoral success was the so-called invisible primary of endorsements from politicians, party leaders, and donors. According to one theory called “the party decides,” it is Democratic and Republican elites, not voters, who decide on their favorite candidates, and these authority figures send signals through the media to the obedient rank and file. It is quite like the old information flow of the music industry: Authority figures (labels and DJs) blasted their preferred products (songs) through scarce and powerful channels of exposure (radio stations) and consumers typically obeyed (bought albums). But in the 2016 primaries, the apparent power of advertising all but vanished. The GOP candidates with the most elite support, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, spent about $140 million on television ads through early 2016, but they both flamed out. The GOP candidate with the least elite support, Donald Trump, spent less than $20 million on advertising. But he still won the exposure primary in a landslide, because his outrageous statements and improbable candidacy were such irresistible fodder for networks and publishers desperate for audiences. Through the summer of 2016, Trump had earned $3 billion in “free media,” which was more than the rest of his rivals combined. With the rise of alternative media sources, party elites lost their ability to control the...

In both politics and business, research shows that advertising is most powerful when consumers are clueless. Political advertising, for example, is most potent when voters are ignorant of politics in general or with the choices in one particular election (that’s one reason why the influence of money tends to be greater in local elections that voters don’t follow as closely). Similarly, corporate brands are most powerful in markets where consumers have little information, according to Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford, and Emanuel Rosen, a former software executive. It could be because the product is somewhat technical (e.g., toothpaste, since most consumers don’t actually know what gel is best for their enamel) or because the product is refined (e.g., wine, where studies have found that consumers prefer any vintage they think is expensive). But just as cable and the Internet have washed away the power of political authorities, challenging the theory that the party decides, the Internet’s flood of information is also diluting the brand power of several consumer products. Consider the market for flat-screen televisions: There are only a few relevant details about a big screen that projects images, like width and resolution. Anybody can find those details online, so who needs to consult the plastic name at the bottom of the screen? No wonder, then, that the business of selling flat-screen televisions has been a disaster: The price of TVs declined 95 percent b...

Think Wirecutter. The best can win out now, in food, travel, products, everything.

Today, there are so many platforms that nobody—not the president, not the Republican Party, not Coca-Cola—can hope to own them all at once. The gatekeepers had their day. Now there are simply too many gates to keep.

There is a psychological term for thinking that feels easy, and fortunately it’s easy to remember, too. It’s called “fluency.” Fluent ideas and products are processed faster and they make us feel better—not just about ideas and products we confront, but also about ourselves. Most people generally prefer ideas that they already agree with, images that are easy to discern, stories that are easy to relate to, and puzzles that are easy to solve.6 One of the most important sources of fluency is familiarity. A familiar idea is simpler to process and place in the mental map. When people see an artwork that reminds them of something they’ve been taught is famous, they feel the thrill of recognition and attribute the thrill to the painting itself. When they read a political argument that reflects their biases, it fits snugly into their story of how the world works. Thus, familiarity, fluency, and fact are inextricably linked. “That idea sounds familiar,” “That idea feels right,” and “That idea is good and true” spill into each other in one mental mush. But not all thinking feels so easy. Some ideas, images, and symbols are more difficult to process, and the term for hard thinking is called “disfluency.” Just as the mental mush conflates fluency with good ideas, people tend to consider disfluency a sign that something is wrong.

Loewy had what must have seemed like an ineffable sense of what people like. He also had a grand theory of it. He called it MAYA. People gravitate to products that are bold, yet instantly comprehensible—“Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.”

Unbeknownst to the now deceased Loewy, this insight has since been validated by a fleet of studies in the last hundred years. It’s been used to explain earworms in pop music, blockbusters in movie theaters, and even the success of memes in digital media. It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.

But in the 1920s, art made a comeback, albeit for commercial reasons. It had become clear that factories could make more than consumers could buy. Americans were still neophobic—afraid of the new—and resistant to change. Capitalists needed buyers to be neophilic—attracted to the new—and so hungry for the next big thing that they’d spend their month’s income on it. It was a period when American industrialists were learning that, to sell more products, you couldn’t just make them practical. You had to make them beautiful—even “cool.” Executives like Alfred Sloan, the CEO of General Motors, recognized that, by changing a car’s style and color every year, consumers might be trained to crave new versions of the same product. This insight—to marry the science of manufacturing efficiency and the science of marketing—inspired the idea of “planned obsolescence.” That means purposefully making products that will be fashionable or functional for only a limited time in order to encourage repeat shopping trips. Across the economy, companies realized that they could engineer turnover and multiply sales by constantly changing the colors, shapes, and styles of their goods. Technology enabled choices and choices created fashion—that perpetual hype cycle where designs and colors and behaviors appear suddenly cool and then suddenly anachronistic.

Loewy’s approach belonged to an emerging philosophy called “industrial design,” which had a dual mandate to make mass-manufactured products more efficient and more lovely. A great industrial designer served as both engineering consultant and consumer psychologist—equally aware of assembly routines and shopping habits.

This is what China needs to take next step in its mfg

Loewy’s personal style was effete—his suits and cars were each fussily self-designed—but his business philosophy was hard-nosed. He believed in ethnography as an entry point for design: First, understand how people behave; second, build products that match their habits.

Loewy was an excellent teacher of consumer preferences in part because he was an obsessive student of consumer habits. He piggybacked off people’s behavior rather than design products that would force them to change their lives.

But Loewy felt that his sensitivity to the familiarities of his consumers connected to a deeper layer of psychology. His MAYA theory—Most Advanced Yet Acceptable—spoke to the tension between people’s interest in being surprised and feeling comforted. “The consumer is influenced in his choice of styling by two opposing factors: (a) attraction to the new and (b) resistance to the unfamiliar,” he wrote. “When resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in, the design in question has reached its MAYA stage: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.” Loewy understood that attention doesn’t just pull in one direction. Instead, it is a tug-of-war between the opposing forces of neophilia versus neophobia, the love of the new versus the preference for the old; people’s need for stimulation versus their preference for what is understandable. A hit is new wine aged in old oak, or a stranger who somehow feels like a friend—a familiar surprise.

the most special experiences and products involve a bit of surprise, unpredictability, and disfluency. Imagine entering a room full of strangers. You look around for somebody you know but you cannot find a single recognizable face. And then suddenly there is a parting in the room, and through the crowd you see her—your best friend. The warm feeling of relief and recognition bursts through the clouds of confusion. That is the ecstasy of sudden fluency, a moment of eureka.

“The creation of meaning itself is what’s rewarding,” researcher Claudia Muth told me. “An artwork doesn’t have to be ‘easy’ to appeal to its audience.” People like a challenge if they think they can solve it. She calls this moment where disfluency yields to fluency the aesthetic aha.

Audiences appreciate aha moments so much that they also enjoy simply expecting them, even if the moment never comes.

Several music critics use videos like “4 Chords” to argue that pop music is simply derivative. But this seems backward. First, if the purpose of music is to move people, and people are moved by that which is sneakily familiar, then creative people should aspire for a blend of originality and derivation.

Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who helped lay the groundwork for quantum theory, said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

This appetite for “optimal newness” runs throughout the hit-making world.

Creative people often bristle at the suggestion that they have to stoop to market their ideas or dress them in familiar garb. It’s pleasant to think that an idea’s brilliance is self-evident and doesn’t require the theater of marketing. But whether you’re an academic, screenwriter, or entrepreneur, the difference between a brilliant new idea with bad marketing and a mediocre idea with excellent marketing can be the difference between bankruptcy and success. The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.

Rather than serve many audiences across the sports spectrum, from college squash to Indian cricket, he said SportsCenter should spend more hours covering mostly the most popular story lines. Why? To maximize the odds that whenever a fan tuned in, he could expect to see a team, player, or controversy that he recognized—like the New England Patriots, LeBron James, or Olympic doping scandals. SportsCenter would become, he decided, an entertainment steakhouse, serving up new takes on the same core sports, stars, and scandals—over and over and over. After that, Bulgrin said, things “started to change rather dramatically.” SportsCenter had become the thing every sports fan quietly craves: a news machine for delivering new takes on familiar stories. Ratings soared, and ESPN has been the favorite network of American men every year since.

In the last few years, CNN has taken the same approach, devoting more time to fewer stories, like terrorist attacks and disappearing airplanes. This makes for pretty repetitive TV, if you watch all day long. But who would want to watch CNN all day long? The typical television news viewer watches about five minutes of cable TV news per day. CNN is doing something smart—maximizing viewers’ expectations that they will see a story they recognize no matter when they tune in.

ESPN and CNN have discovered what Top 40 radio has known for several decades: Most people tune in to a broadcast to hear more of something they already know. Radio audiences can’t anticipate what the next song will be. But as every car driver and radio executive will affirm, people mostly just want to hear songs they recognize. For decades, DJs on pop music radio stations have considered unfamiliar songs to be “tune-outs” because audiences tend to spurn new music. These listeners want to be surprised—that’s why they play the radio rather than a CD or playlist—but they want to be surprised by the feeling of familiarity.

A good headline, they said, is not overly familiar, but rather familiar enough; a welcome surprise expressed in the vernacular of its intended audience; a promise to advance understanding in a broadly acceptable subject—MAYA.8

The most significant neophilic group in the consumer economy is probably teenagers. Young people are “far more receptive to advanced designs,” Loewy wrote, because they have the smallest stake in the status quo. “The dream of the alert industrial designer would be to design for teen-agers . . . Whether or not they fall periodically for some silly fad that does harm to no one, their basic taste remains fundamentally correct.”

neophilia and neophobia are not isolated states, but rather warring states, constantly doing battle both within the mind of every buyer and within an entire economy of buyers.

The original version of Discover Weekly was supposed to include only songs that users had never heard before. But in its first internal test at Spotify, a bug in the algorithm let through songs that users already knew. “Everyone reported it as a bug, and we fixed it so that every single song was totally new,” he said. But after his team fixed the bug, something unusual happened: Engagement with the playlist fell. “It turns out having a bit of familiarity bred trust, especially for first-time users. If we make a new playlist for you and there’s not a single thing for you to hook onto or recognize, to go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good call!’ it’s completely intimidating and people don’t engage.” The original bug was actually an essential feature. Discover Weekly was a more appealing product when it had even one familiar band or song. “I think users wanted to trust the feature, but they were waiting to see some sign that it knew them, too,” Ogle said. Spotify users wanted a fresh taste. But they also wanted to make sure it wouldn’t kill them.