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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.
Brahms’s musical genius gave the song its appeal. But German emigration helped to give the lullaby its reach.
Some people disdain distribution and marketing as pointless, boring, tawdry, or all three. But they are the subterranean roots that push beautiful things to the surface, where audiences can see them.
Whether the vector is a transatlantic voyage or a San Francisco Twitter account, the story of a product’s distribution is as important as a description of its features. It is rarely sufficient to design the perfect product without designing an equally thoughtful plan to get it to the right people.
But one painter’s water lilies become a global cultural hit—enshrined in picture books, studied by art historians, gawked at by high school students, and highlighted in every tour of the National Gallery of Art—and the other painter is little known among casual art fans. Why?
What set these seven painters apart? They didn’t share a common style. They did not receive unique praise from contemporary critics, nor did they suffer equal censure. There is no record that this group socialized exclusively, collected each other’s works exclusively, or exhibited exclusively. In fact, there would seem to be only one exclusive quality the most famous impressionists shared. The core seven impressionist painters were the only seven impressionists in Gustave Caillebotte’s bequest.
The students in this second class saw a nonfamous impressionist painting four times for every one time they glimpsed a famous artwork.
At the end of the second course, Cutting asked the 151 students to choose their favorite paintings among fifty-one pairs. The results of the popularity contest turned the canon upside down.
It’s extraordinary that Caillebotte’s bequest helped to shape the canon of impressionism because he purposefully bought his friends’ least popular paintings. Caillebotte made it a principle to buy “especially those works of his friends which seemed particularly unsaleable,” the art historian John Rewald wrote. For example, Caillebotte served as a buyer of last resort when he purchased Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette.
She told me that a lack of exposure might account for Caillebotte’s anonymity for another reason: Impressionism’s most important collector didn’t try to sell his art.
It wasn’t that some rectangles were perfectly rectangular. It wasn’t that some Chinese-like characters were perfectly Chinese-like. 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.
The evolutionary explanation for the exposure effect is simple: If you recognize an animal or plant, then it hasn’t killed you yet.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger once said, “Every man is born as many men and dies a single one.”
Not counting the amphitheater, the public museum was arguably the first technology to distribute artistic works—what is now collectively known as “content”—to a mass audience.
In New York City near the end of the nineteenth century, writers and publishers near a part of Union Square nicknamed “Tin Pan Alley” developed an elaborate process of plugging new music. They would pass out song sheets to local musicians, who would play each tune in different neighborhoods, from the Lower East Side to the Upper West, and report back on which songs clicked. The American standards that came out of this period—such as “The Band Played On,” “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and “God Bless America”—were the products of an elaborate testing and distribution strategy that ran on sheet
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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.
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.
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.”
There is a play-it-at-home game to explain this effect. Follow these four steps: Think of the last movie, play, or TV show that you finished: Whisper it to yourself. Between 1 (awful) and 10 (perfect), imagine how you might rate it. Now think of seven specific things you liked about the movie or show. Count them on your fingers and don’t stop until you hit seven. Finalize your rating of the show. This sort of game is famous because something curious often happens: Between steps 2 and 4, the rating typically goes down.
At a time when American tastes were in violent flux, 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.”
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.
This insight—to marry the science of manufacturing efficiency and the science of marketing—inspired the idea of “planned obsolescence.”
In studies, Hekkert and his team asked respondents to rate several products, like cars, telephones, and teakettles, for their “typicality, novelty and aesthetic preference”—that is, for familiarity, surprise, and liking. The researchers found that neither measure of typicality nor novelty alone had much to do with most people’s preference; only taken together did they consistently predict the designs that people said they liked.
The Studebaker coupes, pencil sharpeners, and locomotives of the era all hold the same ovular style. This was purposeful. Loewy thought the egg was nature’s time-tested pinnacle of design and function, a structure of such precise curvature that a shell less than one one-hundredth of an inch thick could resist twenty pounds of applied pressure. Once you know Loewy’s north star, it’s impossible to stop seeing eggs—or eggish curves—throughout his firm’s designs.
The last chapter explained how one of the most powerful forces in popularity is the power of exposure. Exposure breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds fluency, and fluency often breeds liking.
First the researchers recorded people’s reactions to the paintings alone; they weren’t very good. But then the scientists included clues to the paintings’ meaning, or brief histories of the painters themselves. With these clues, audience ratings improved dramatically; suddenly, the abstract paintings were not like the inscrutable backs of strangers, but rather like a new friend, reaching out to take their hand.
There is a popular online video called “4 Chords,” with more than thirty million views, in which the musical comedy group the Axis of Awesome cycles through dozens of songs built on the same four chords—I–V–vi–IV.
The most novel proposals got the worst ratings. “Everyone dislikes novelty,” lead author Karim Lakhani explained to me, and “experts tend to be overcritical of proposals in their own domain.” Extremely familiar proposals fared a little bit better, but they also received lower scores. The highest evaluation scores went to submissions that were deemed slightly new. There is an “optimal newness” for ideas, Lakhani said—advanced yet acceptable.
When I was younger, I used to say a great headline should be “definitive or delightful.” That is, it should try to make a clear and superlative statement (“One Graph Explains Why the United States Is the World’s Best Place to Start a Company”) or it should be obviously funny or cute
Several years ago, the Internet was awash with an exotic species of headline based on something called the “curiosity gap.”
my personal headline motto changed, again, to: “A reader’s favorite subject is the reader.”
Meanwhile, these Stanford computer scientists were putting empirical meat on the bare bones of my headline writing theories. They concluded that the most successful headlines on Reddit presented novel images or stories while “[conforming] to the linguistic norms of the community to which it is submitted.”
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.
First: Audiences don’t know everything, but they know more than creators do.
Second: To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.9
Third: People sometimes don’t know what they want until they already love it.
Why Sweden? The answer involves a mix of policy, history, and the magnetizing effect of talent. First, the Swedish government actively promotes public music education at a time when many countries have no such policy (“I have public music education to thank for everything,” Martin said in 2001). Second, Sweden has a musical culture that promotes major-chord melodies over lyrics, which makes their songs highly exportable to audiences who don’t speak Swedish. Third, since ABBA’s heyday in the 1970s, Sweden has built a national industry dedicated to writing, producing, and selling pop music,
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Earworms are like a keyhole into music’s manipulation of time’s past and future. The earworm-infested brain is stuck in a loop between repetition (I want to remember how this goes) and anticipation (I want to know how this ends). This very entanglement—the pull of repetition versus the push of anticipation—defines the catchiest songs.
The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all recorded music revenue. And even though the amount of digital music sold has surged, the ten bestselling tracks command 82 percent more of the market than they did a decade ago.
To scare a mouse for the longest period of time with the fewest notes, scientists have found success with variations on the following sequence: BBBBC–BBBC–BBC–BC–D
I’m particularly drawn to the final snippet of the sequence, which is this: BBC–BC–D This structure might not seem obviously familiar to you. But let’s call B a verse, C a chorus, and D an alternate verse, or bridge. Replace the notes with their corresponding words and you get the following song structure. I think you’ll recognize it, because it might be the most common pattern of the last fifty years of pop music. Verse-verse-chorus—verse-chorus—bridge16
Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which
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Obama and Favreau did not lean quite so heavily on any one device, but they made a powerful combo in part because they thought about speeches the way Savan Kotecha and other songwriters think about songs—as requiring hooks, choruses, and clear structures. They often drew on the speeches of Martin Luther King for inspiration, which were biblical, rhythmic, and propelled by a musicality that was explicit in the black preaching tradition. In The Hum: Call and Response in African American Preaching, the theologian Evans Crawford compared sermons to blues riffs, “characterized by improvised free
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A cousin of the “speech-to-song” illusion is the “rhyme-as-reason” effect. Just as repetition of words can create the illusion of singing, musical language can create the illusion of rationality.
But it is precisely because of their musicality that we accept these statements, broadly constructed, as truths. People process the rhyme, and then they seek the reason.
The specific beats of Campbell’s arc aren’t as important as its three primary ingredients: inspiration, relatability, and suspense.
His formula has received the Hollywood treatment several times over, notably in a 1985 memo from the Disney story consultant Christopher Vogler, which became the screenwriting textbook The Writer’s Journey. Its most recent reincarnation is Save the Cat, the modern bible of screenwriting, which seemingly every person with a screenplay on a laptop has read, claimed to have read, or pointedly (and often fictitiously) claimed not to have read so as to seem rebellious.
Bruzzese studied millions of survey answers from thousands of people watching thousands of movies. It turned out that Campbell was right. There are rules to successful storytelling in popular films. The typical audience member couldn’t tell you explicitly what those rules are, but collectively audiences have been telling moviemakers for decades. Bruzzese’s grand theory will look familiar to readers of the first three chapters of this book: Most people love original storytelling, provided that the narrative arc traces the stories we know and the stories that we want to tell ourselves.
“Horror might be the easiest genre to break down,” he told me. “Horror movies are either a haunting or a killer. A haunting movie has either a ghost or demon. The demon is either randomly targeting the lead actors or summoned by the leads.”
Another genre that yields to simple classification is the apocalypse. There are two species of apocalypse movies, Bruzzese says: Stop the Apocalypse and Survive the Apocalypse.
