To my parents:
Schlaf nun selig und süß,
schau im Traum’s Paradies.
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
INTRODUCTION
The Song That Conquered the World
PART I: POPULARITY AND THE MIND
1. THE POWER OF EXPOSURE
Featuring Claude Monet, Adele, and Donald Trump
2. THE MAYA RULE
Featuring ESPN, Spotify, and the First NASA Space Station
3. THE MUSIC OF SOUND
Featuring John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and ABBA
INTERLUDE: THE CHILLS
4. THE MYTH-MAKING MIND I: THE FORCE OF STORY
Featuring Star Wars, Isaac Asimov, and Hollywood Psychohistory
5. THE MYTH-MAKING MIND II: THE DARK SIDE OF HITS
Featuring Hungarian Vampires, Disney Princesses, and Cable News
6. THE BIRTH OF FASHION
Featuring Taylor Swift, the Printing Press, and the Laugh Track
INTERLUDE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TEENS
PART II: POPULARITY AND THE MARKET
7. ROCK AND ROLL AND RANDOMNESS
Featuring the Mona Lisa, “Rock Around the Clock,” and Chaos Theory
8. THE VIRAL MYTH
Featuring Fifty Shades of Grey, John Snow, and Pokémon GO
9. THE AUDIENCE OF MY AUDIENCE
Featuring Etsy, Bumble, and Moonies
INTERLUDE: LE PANACHE
10. WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT I: THE ECONOMICS OF PROPHECY
Featuring Game of Thrones, Seinfeld, and Shazam
11. WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT II: A HISTORY OF PIXELS AND INK
Featuring the Tabloid, the Television, and the News Feed
INTERLUDE: 828 BROADWAY
12. THE FUTURES OF HITS: EMPIRE AND CITY-STATE
Featuring Mickey Mouse, BuzzFeed, and Kid A
Notes
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars …
—Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science
The first song I loved was my mother’s. Each night, she would sit on the left side of my bed and sing the same lullaby. Her voice was sweet and small and shaped to fit inside a bedroom. On trips to my maternal grandparents’ house in Detroit, my Momi would sing the same tune in a lower register, with a scratchier timbre and German lyrics. I didn’t know what the words meant, but I loved them for their ancient mystery in the old house: “Guten Abend, gute Nacht …”
I used to think the song was a family heirloom. But in first grade, at one of the first sleepovers in my Virginia hometown, a young friend turned the dial on the small music box by his bed and digital chimes tinkled to a familiar tune.
I learned that my mother’s melody was not a family secret. It was astonishingly common. There is a strong possibility that you have heard it dozens of times, and perhaps thousands. It is Johannes Brahms’s lullaby “Wiegenlied”—“Lullaby and good night, with roses bedight …”
Millions of families all over the world have sung a version of Brahms’s lullaby to their children, every night, for more than a century. It is one of the most common melodies in the Western Hemisphere. Considering that a lullaby is sung every evening for hundreds of days a year for several years in a child’s life, there is real possibility that Brahms’s lullaby could be one of the most heard songs in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world.
“Wiegenlied” is undeniably beautiful and simple and repetitive—all necessary elements of any song produced for infants from the throats of tired parents. But a melody so universal is also a mystery. How did a nineteenth-century German tune become one of the world’s most popular songs?
Johannes Brahms, born in 1833 in Hamburg, was one of the most well-known composers of his time. “Wiegenlied” was his most immediate success. Published at the height of his popularity in 1868, the song was written as a lullaby for an old friend to sing to her new baby boy. But it soon became a hit throughout the continent, and the world.
One of Brahms’s tricks for replenishing his deep well of pretty melodies was genre blending. He was a student of local music and a subtle thief of catchy choruses. When he traveled Europe, he would often visit a city’s library to go through its folk song collections to study reams of sheet music and transcribe his favorite bits. Like a savvy modern songwriter sampling another artist’s hook for his own music—or a clever designer stealing flourishes from other products—Brahms would incorporate far-flung folk tunes into his art songs.
Several years before he wrote his famous lullaby, Brahms fell in love with a teenage soprano in Hamburg named Bertha. She sang many songs to him, like Alexander Baumann’s Austrian folk song “S’is Anderscht.” Some years later, Bertha married another man, and they named their son Johannes after the composer. Brahms wanted to show his gratitude—and, perhaps, his lingering affection. He wrote the couple a lullaby based on the old Austrian folk song that Bertha used to sing to him. For the lyrics, Brahms took a verse from a famous collection of German poems, Des Knaben Wunderhorn:
Good evening, good night;
with roses bedecked,
with clove pinks adorned,
slip under the blanket. In the morning, God willing,
you will waken again.
In the summer of 1868, Brahms sent the family sheet music for the lullaby with a note. “Bertha will realize that I wrote the Wiegenlied for her little one. She will find it quite in order … that while she is singing Hans to sleep, a love song is being sung to her.” The song’s first major performance came one year later, on December 22, 1869, in Vienna. It was a huge commercial success. Brahms’s publisher rushed to make fourteen arrangements of the song—the most of any Brahms piece by far—including for four-part men’s choir, three-part piano, the harp, and the zither.
“A lot of Brahms’s melodies are beautiful, but ‘Wiegenlied’ uniquely fits the standard structure that modern music listeners recognize in hooks,” said Daniel Beller-McKenna, a Brahms scholar who serves on the board of directors at the American Brahms Society. “It has the key elements of repetition and then gentle surprise,” he went on, humming the tune intermittently as we spoke. “Wiegenlied” was an original. But it was also surprisingly familiar, an assembly of folk song allusions and Hamburg memories. One music historian said the piece so resembled Baumann’s original folk song that it amounted to a “veiled but identifiable parody.”
But this history still doesn’t answer the most important question about the lullaby: How did it spread around the world? In the twentieth century, most pop songs became popular because they played on the radio or on other mass media broadcasts again and again. Songs pushed their way into audiences’ ears through car speakers, television sets, and movie theaters. To like a song, you first had to find it; or, from another perspective, the song had to find you.
In the nineteenth century, however, songs by famous composers may have hopped between concert halls, but there was no adequate technology to quickly move a song around the globe. To appreciate the slow pace at which culture traveled in Brahms’s day, consider the leisurely transatlantic voyage of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It debuted at the Kaerntnertor Theater in Vienna in 1824, when Beethoven was reportedly so deaf he could not hear the thunderous applause. But the first performance in the United States wasn’t for another twenty-two years, in New York City, in 1846. It took nine more years for the symphony to first play in Boston.
Imagine if every artistic masterwork took thirty-one years to cross the ocean today. Michael Jackson’s album Thriller debuted in 1982, which means Jackson would have been dead for four years by the time Londoners could hear the title track and “Billie Jean” in 2013. Please Please Me, the first album by the Beatles, was released in March 1963 in the UK, so Americans would not have met the Beatles until the middle of the Clinton administration. In 2021, Europeans could look forward to the first season of Seinfeld.
Radio signals weren’t moving in the late 1870s. But German families were. While Brahms was at his creative peak, central Europe was a cauldron of chaos, war, and famine. In the twenty years after “Wiegenlied” debuted in Vienna in 1869, German immigration to the United States soared, peaking at an all-time high in the 1880s. The United States took in more German immigrants between 1870 and 1890 than in the entire twentieth century. A popular lullaby was blessed with fortuitous timing to be exported across Europe and into America, particularly the northern band of the country where most Germans settled, from the Northeast and Pennsylvania through Ohio and Michigan and into Wisconsin.
A historic exodus of German-speaking families accomplished what neither radio nor any other technology could in 1870. An unprecedented transatlantic migration distributed the lullaby to America.
Near the height of German emigration, in 1879, a part-time rabbi named Joseph Kahn lived in the small town of Echternach in eastern Luxembourg. Joseph and his wife, Rosalie, traveled by ship to the United States with their five children to find a better life. Like so many German-speaking Jewish immigrants, they eventually settled in the upper Midwest, in Michigan.
Joseph and Rosalie’s grandson was a handsome and prematurely balding young man named William. He went by Bill, and he loved to host pool parties by his house in Franklin, a leafy suburb of Detroit. One afternoon in 1948, in a green field by his ivy-covered home, he noticed a young girl named Ellen, whose family had also left Germany, to escape the Nazis. They fell in love and married within eight months. The following October, Bill and Ellen had a baby girl. She would hear Brahms’s lullaby in the original German thousands of times in her life. I knew that girl, too. It was my mom.
This is a book about hits, the few products and ideas that achieve extraordinary popularity and commercial success in pop culture and media. The thesis of this book is that even though many number one songs, television shows, blockbuster films, Internet memes, and ubiquitous apps seem to come out of nowhere, this cultural chaos is governed by certain rules: the psychology of why people like what they like, the social networks through which ideas spread, and the economics of cultural markets. There is a way for people to engineer hits and, equally important, a way for other people to know when popularity is being engineered.
At its core, the book asks two questions:
These two questions are related, but they are not the same, and the answer to the first has changed less over time than the answer to the second. Products change and fashions rise and fall. But the architecture of the human mind is ancient, and the most basic human needs—to belong, to escape, to aspire, to understand, to be understood—are eternal. This is one reason why the stories of hits harmonize across history and, as we’ll see, both creators and audiences are forever replaying the anxieties and the joys of past cultures.
One can find answers to both central questions in the story of the Brahms “Wiegenlied.” Why did audiences immediately adore his lullaby? Perhaps it’s because many of them had heard the melody, or something like it. Brahms had borrowed a popular Austrian folk tune and bedecked it with concert hall grandeur. His lullaby was an instant success not because it was incomparably original, but because it offered a familiar melody in an original setting.
Some new products and ideas slip into the well-worn grooves of people’s expectations. In fifteen out of the last sixteen years, the highest-grossing movie in America has been a sequel of a previously successful movie (e.g., Star Wars) or an adaptation of a previously successful book (e.g., The Grinch). 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.
The “Wiegenlied” was a familiar surprise for its German audience. But that alone didn’t make it one of the most popular songs in the whole Western Hemisphere. Without the wars that rocked central Europe in the 1870s and 1880s, millions of Germans wouldn’t have emigrated and perhaps millions of children who know the song by heart today would never have heard it. Brahms’s musical genius gave the song its appeal. But German emigration helped to give the lullaby its reach.
The way that ideas spread, both to groups of people and within those groups, is deeply important and widely misunderstood. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about all the songs, books, and products they’ve never seen. But a brilliant article in an obscure journal goes unread, a catchy song with no radio play withers in obscurity, and a moving documentary without a distribution deal can be doomed to oblivion, no matter how brilliant. So the first question for people with a new product is: How do I get my idea to my audience?
The “Wiegenlied” was played live only for several thousand people. Yet today millions of people know the tune. The song spread far beyond the shadow of the Vienna opera house, through families and friendships and a variety of social networks around the world. So the deeper question for people with a new product or idea is: How can I make something that people will share on their own—with the audience of my audience? There is no formula here. But there are some basic truths about what brings people together and makes people talk—like why selling a dating app requires the opposite strategy of selling a hipster fashion line, and why people share bad news with friends and good news on Facebook. Making beautiful things is critical. But understanding these human networks is equally essential for hit makers.
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. It is not enough to study products themselves to understand their inherent appeal, because quite often the most popular things are hardly what anybody would consider the “best.” They are the most popular everywhere because they are, simply, everywhere. Content might be king, but distribution is the kingdom.
It’s interesting to compare the story of the “Wiegenlied,” an old-world hit, to the story of a quintessentially new-world hit, the photo-sharing app Instagram, to look for the common themes of familiarity and the power of networks.
If the marketplace for nineteenth-century piano music was crowded, the emporium of photo-sharing applications in the last few years is downright mayhem. In 1999, the world took eighty billion photos and bought seventy million cameras, according to Kodak’s 2000 annual report. Today, the world shares more than eighty billion photos every month on several billion phones, tablets, computers, and cameras.
Like several other apps, Instagram lets users take photos and add retro-cinematic filters. The design was close to perfect for its purpose: simple and beautiful, with intuitive ways to edit and share images from people’s lives. But there were many simple, beautiful apps in this space, and Instagram did not invent the idea of filters. What was so special about Instagram?
The app’s success owed equally to art and dissemination. Before Instagram debuted, its founders gave early versions of the app to San Francisco tech tycoons like entrepreneur Kevin Rose, journalist M. G. Siegler, tech evangelist Robert Scoble, and Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey. These tech celebrities posted several Instagram photos on Twitter, where they collectively had millions of followers. By tapping into massive networks that already existed, Instagram reached thousands of people before it even launched.
The day Instagram debuted, on October 6, 2010, twenty-five thousand people downloaded the app, which soared to the top of the App Store. Many iPhone users who had seen Dorsey’s Instagram photos in their Twitter feeds eagerly downloaded the app when it became public. Silicon Valley writers said they had never seen a start-up get so much promotion and attention from tech blogs before launch. Instagram’s success was about a clean, fun, and simple product. It was also about the network it launched into.
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.
In Brahms’s time, if you wanted people to hear your symphony, you needed to find musicians and a concert hall. Commercial music was scarce, and the music business belonged to the people who controlled the halls and the printing presses.
But today, something interesting is happening. 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 revolution in media is clearest in the last sixty years in moving pictures and video. When the biblical blockbuster Ben-Hur premiered on November 18, 1959, before a celebrity audience of more than 1,800 at Loew’s State Theatre in New York City, the movie industry was the third-largest retail business in the United States, after groceries and cars. The movie set Hollywood records for the largest production budget and the most expensive marketing campaign ever, and it became the second-highest-grossing movie in history at that time, behind Gone with the Wind.
The twinkling of camera flashes at that premiere might have blinded some movie executives to the fact that Americans’ monogamous relationship with the silver screen was already ending. Television proved an irresistible seductress. By 1965, more than 90 percent of households had a television set, and they were spending more than five hours watching it every day. 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.
Television replaced film as the most popular medium of visual storytelling, along with a massive shift in attention and dollars—from weekly movie tickets to cable bills, whose monthly payments have supported a vast ecosystem of live sports, both brilliant and formulaic dramas, and endless reality shows. The most famous moviemaking corporations in the world, like the Walt Disney Company and Time Warner, have for years made more profit from cable channels like ESPN and TBS than from their entire movie divisions. In the early twenty-first century, every movie company is not so secretly in the television business.
But today television is merely the largest screen in a glittering world of glass. In 2012, for the first time ever, Americans spent more time interacting with digital devices like their laptops and phones than with television. In 2013, the world produced almost four billion square feet of LCD screens, or about eighty square inches for every living human being. In developing regions—like China, Indonesia, and sub-Saharan Africa—audiences skipped the era of desktops and laptops altogether and started with computers in their pockets.
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).
As late as 2000, the media landscape was dominated by one-to-one-million productions, on movie screens, television screens, and car radios. But ours is a mobile world, where hits, like Angry Birds, and empires, like Facebook, thrive on tiny glassy plates. In 2015, the technology analyst Mary Meeker reported that one quarter of America’s media attention is devoted to mobile devices that did not exist a decade ago. Television is not dying so much as it is pollinating a billion video streams on a variety of screens, most of which people can carry in their hands. Television once freed “moving images” from the clutches of the cineplex; in the historical sequel, mobile technology is emancipating video from the living room.
As the medium changed, so have the messages. Traditional broadcast television was live, ad supported, and aired once a week. This made it a perfect home for dramas and crime procedurals that relied on several cliffhangers per episode (to extend viewership throughout the commercials) and pat endings. But streaming television, which is often commercial-free, rewards audiences who watch for several hours at a time. People don’t have to stop after one episode of House of Cards on Netflix or Downton Abbey on Amazon Video; they can watch as much as they want. Combining the aesthetic of film, the episodic nature of traditional television, and the “binge” potential of a novel or Wagnerian opera, the near future of television isn’t bound by the straitjacket of one-hour blocks. It’s “long-form”—or, perhaps, any-form.
Meanwhile, smaller content is eroding television from the bottom. In April 2013, Robby Ayala, a Florida Atlantic University senior, posted several videos making fun of the campus’s abundance of raccoons on Vine, a defunct social network of six-second loops that, for millions of young people, made for better television than television. When he amassed more than one million followers a few months later, he dropped out of law school and went to work for a Twitter-owned network for Vine stars. He amassed 3.4 million followers and a billion total views of his videos and earned a living by performing in sponsored posts for companies like HP. Actors used to go to Los Angeles or New York because those cities housed the gatekeepers who owned the distribution of media. But now any person with a phone or computer could be next week’s viral sensation. In this moment of gate-crashers and global attention, anybody can be a hit maker.
Technology has always shaped entertainment—and our expectations of what sort of content is “good.” In the eighteenth century, audiences who attended symphonies paid for a long evening’s performance. In the early twentieth century, the music industry moved into the business of radio and vinyl. The first ten-inch vinyl records could comfortably hold about three minutes of music, which helped shape expectations that a modern pop single shouldn’t be more than 240 seconds. Today, a Vine is just six seconds.
Is six-second entertainment ludicrously brief? It is—if you were raised on Schubert, Brahms, and concert halls. It’s not—if you were raised on Robby Ayala, Facebook, and the 3.5-inch screen of a smartphone. For better and for worse, people tend to gravitate toward the familiar, and technology shapes these familiarities.
The screens are getting smaller, and they’re also getting smarter. We used to merely consume content. Now the content consumes us too—our behaviors, our rituals, and our identities. Before the 1990s, the music industry had no daily information on who was listening to songs in their homes and on the radio. Today, every time you play a song on your phone, the music industry is listening, too, and using your input to guide the next hit. Facebook, Twitter, and digital publishers have tools that tell them not only what story you click on, but also how far you read and where you click next. We used to just play the hits; now the hits play us back.
These smart devices have injected a measure of science into the work of building hits and helping companies crack that ultimate code for consumers and audiences: What do we pay attention to, and why?
A book that seeks to explain the tastes of billions of people and the success or failure of millions of products is going to make some assumptions that, while defensible in the aggregate, fail to account for some exceptions. I’ve tried to avoid making sweeping statements that aren’t supported by a significant body of evidence. But taking great care to avoid wrongness is not the same as always being right.
A few months before I started writing this book, I found two quotes that I liked. I copied them to a note on my computer that I could always see. They are the quotes at the beginning of this chapter.
The first quote comes from Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. It is an ode to complexity. Kublai Khan asks if there is a single stone that supports a bridge. Marco Polo responds that a bridge stands not because of one solitary rock, but because of an arch drawn through many stones.
The nonfiction genre has, in the last few decades, seen a bonanza of small books about life that are subject to a common criticism. They oversimplify the shape of the human mind, which, like Polo’s bridge, is not explained by one stone or another, but by the interaction of an uncountable number of supportive elements. This book, too, is asking some unwieldy questions: Why do some ideas and products become popular? What factors draw the line between hits and flops? The effort to find satisfying answers to these questions will naturally require some generalization. But throughout the process, I’ve tried to remember that people’s tastes are not ruled by a single concept or biological law. Rather, the shape of an individual’s preferences is an arch supported by many stones.
That Calvino quote alone would be a good argument against a book like this, which seeks grand theories for how the world works. But that’s where the second quote comes in.
Borges describes an empire with a cartography guild so advanced that it designs a life-size map. Yet the people reject this achievement of exactitude, and the map’s tatters ultimately serve to clothe beggars in the desert. There is virtue in simplicity. 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.
One of the themes of this book is that audiences are hungry for meaning, and their preferences are guided by an interplay between the complex and the simple, the stimulation of new things and a deep comfort with the familiar. Rather than find shortcuts that oversimplify the reasons why some cultural products succeed, my goal is to tell a complex story in a simple way. The spine of this book is too small to hold Marco Polo’s bridge. At best, I hope to find good stones, to draw a fine map.