Then they would “exploit,” or productively focus on one particular area.īerg’s and Wang’s research suggests three rules of thumb that may come in handy for creative work.įirst, extremely new ideas are unlikely to initially find a large audience. First, artists and scientists would “explore,” or experiment with a bunch of different ideas, styles, jobs, or topics, before they really got in the zone. When he looked closer at what preceded these hot streaks, he found a similar pattern. The Northwestern University economist Dashun Wang has found that artists and scientists tend to have “hot streaks,” or tight clusters of highly successful work. This second finding about the benefits of early variety is similar to a model of creativity known as explore-exploit.
Nobody wants Bruce Springsteen to make a rap album. “After the first hit, the research showed that it was good for artists to focus on what I call relatedness, or similarity of music,” he said. But down the line, variety wasn’t very useful, possibly because audience expectations are set by initial hits. She could experiment within the kingdom of country-pop without much competition from other artists, and this allowed her to dominate the charts for the next decade.īerg’s research also found that musical variety (as opposed to novelty) was useful for artists before they broke out. After her second album, he said, her novelty, which had previously been an artistic risk, helped her retain listeners. “Twain is a great fit for the model, because her blending of pop and country was so original before she had her breakout,” Berg told me. She was pioneering a new pop-country crossover genre that was bold for her time but would later inspire a generation of artists, like Taylor Swift. After that hit, the band struggled to distinguish their sound from everything else that was going on in music.īy contrast, Twain’s breakout hit rated high on novelty in Berg’s research. According to Berg, this was the sort of song that was very likely to become a one-hit wonder: It rose to fame because of a quirky music video, not because the song itself stood out for its uniqueness. Dreamy, guitar-driven soft rock wasn’t exactly innovative in 1992. But once you have a hit, novelty suddenly becomes a huge asset that is likely to sustain your success.” Mass audiences are drawn to what’s familiar, but they become loyal to what’s consistently distinct.īlind Melon’s “No Rain” rated extremely low on novelty in Berg’s research. “Being very different from the mainstream is really, really bad for your likelihood of initially making a hit when you’re not well known. “Novelty is a double-edged sword,” Berg told me. This allowed him to quantify how similar a given hit is to the contemporary popular-music landscape (which he calls “novelty”), and the musical diversity of an artist’s body of work (“variety”). He used an algorithm developed by the company EchoNest to measure the songs’ sonic features, including key, tempo, and danceability. This month, the Stanford psychologist Justin Berg published a new paper on the topic and argued that the secret to creative success just happens to hinge on the difference between “No Rain” and Shania Twain.īerg compiled a data set of more than 3 million songs released from 1959 to 2010 and pulled out the biggest hits.
Is the thing that separates one-hit wonders from consistent hitmakers luck, or talent, or some complex combination of factors? I did my best to summarize their work in my book, Hit Makers. She became one of the most consistent hitmakers of her era, and the only female artist ever with three straight albums certified Diamond, meaning more than 10 million copies sold.įor decades, psychologists have puzzled over the ingredients of creative popularity by studying music, because the medium offers literally millions of data points. 1 hit “Any Man of Mine.” Whatever the polar opposite of a one-hit wonder is, that’s what Shania Twain turned out to be. Shania Twain released her second album, The Woman in Me, which included the No. Soon after Blind Melon topped the charts, another artist had a breakout moment. Two decades later, Rolling Stone named “No Rain” one of the biggest one-hit wonders of all time. But that was the last time the band ever struck gold. The song rocketed up the Billboard Hot 100 charts. The record was mostly ignored until a music video for the song “No Rain,” featuring a girl in glasses dressed as a bumblebee, went berserk on MTV. In September 1992, the band Blind Melon released their self-titled debut album.
0 kommentar(er)
