Hit Makers was recommend to me by a friend in the music business, who found it a profound and practical study of how things become hits. And he’s right. Whether you’re a businessperson, a musician, a film maker, an ad exec, or just a curious soul, reading this book will make you better at what you do. It will help you understand culture and the consumer mind.
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
But perhaps every hit is a cult hit. You could easily say that from a majoritarian standpoint, nothing is popular. The mainstream does not exist. Culture is cults, all the way down.
There is an old Japanese term that perfectly sums up this surfeit of content: “tsundoku.” It means the piling up of unread books.
people crave fresh voices telling them familiar stories, because they enjoy the thrill of discovery but ultimately gravitate to the comfort of fluency.
In study after study, people reliably chose the words and funny shapes that they’d seen 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.
Even governance is showbiz: One third of the White House staff works in some aspect of public relations to promote the president and his policies, according to political scientists Matthew Baum and Samuel Kernell. The White House is a studio, and the president is its star.
A cheeky UK experiment found that British students’ opinion of former prime minister Tony Blair sank as they listed more of his good qualities. Spouses offer higher appraisals of their partners when asked to name fewer charming characteristics. When something becomes hard to think about, people transfer the discomfort of the thought to the object of their thinking
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.
Writing poetry without rhyme is “like playing tennis without a net,” the poet Robert Frost once said. In music, repetition is the net.
But in all cases, the hero is the synthesis of his friends. The thinking Spock and the feeling McCoy are two halves of Captain Kirk. The brilliant Hermione and the sensitive Ron balance out Harry Potter. Luke Skywalker combines Han’s bravery and Leia’s conscience
The good news is that getting your child to like broccoli is possible through repeat exposure. The bad news is that familiarizing broccoli is an expensive chore for parents, requiring up to fifteen servings for kids to accept the bitter vegetable.
If the lead male character sleeps with somebody else during this break, the audience will ultimately forgive him when he reconciles with the lead actress, Bruzzese said. But if the female lead sleeps with somebody during this temporary breakup? Even the women in the audience will stop rooting for her.
“If you look at the most universal forms of laughter shared across species, when rats laugh or when dogs laugh, it’s often in response to aggressive forms of play, like chasing or tickling,” Warren told me (and, yes, rats can laugh). “Chasing and tickling are both the threat of an attack, but without an actual attack.”
This is the life span of the laugh track: It was conceived in controversy, grew up to become a social norm, and is dying a cliché. In other words, the laugh track was a fashion. The sound of other people laughing, which used to make people laugh, now makes many people cringe.
Clothing, once a ritual, is now the definitive fashion. First names, once a tradition, now follow the hype cycle of fashion lines. Communication, too, is now coming to resemble the hallmarks of a fashion, where choices emerge and preferences change, sometimes with seeming arbitrariness, as people discover new, more convenient, and more fun ways to say hello.
If you think Tinder and dating apps are destroying romance today, you would have hated cars in the 1900s. Cars didn’t just hasten a historical shift from teenage codependence to independence. They fed the growth of a high school subculture.
But what is coolness, anyway? In sociology, it is sometimes defined as a positive rebellion.
When you share something online, you are giving up nothing. In fact, you are gaining something quite valuable: an audience. Sharing, in the context of information, isn’t really sharing. It’s much more like talking.
“The best jokes are so specific that they feel private,” he told me. “It’s that surprise, I think, that people like—that I shared something that felt almost too small and personal for anybody else to know.”
First, people seek out others who are like them. Sociologists call this “sorting.” Second, individuals change to become more like the group around them. This is called “socializing.”
Publicly, people often talk about issues. Privately, they talk about schedules. Publicly, they deploy strategic emotions. Privately, they tend to share small troubles. Publicly, they want to be interesting. Privately, they want to be understood.
HBO does not rely on dial testing, focus groups, or surveys, its executives told me, because its business model requires something subtler. Its economic imperative is to build a television product that viewers feel like they have to pay for—even when they don’t watch it.
“When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.” – Jeff Bezos
Originating in late 1800s medicine, the word “tabloid” first referred to a small tablet of drugs. It soon became a catchall for a smaller, compressed form of anything, including journalism and newspapers.
Writers used to call each fad a “nine days’ wonder.” In the 1960s, Andy Warhol predicted that everybody would have just fifteen minutes of fame. The half life of notoriety is shrinking.
Umberto Eco called Disneyland “the quintessence of consumer ideology,” because it “not only produces illusion,” but also “stimulates the desire for it.”
(all of the above are from Hit Makers by Derek Thompson)
