Same old same old sells in pop music (and in writing?)

[Hopscotch]

A Stanford Psychologist Says He's Cracked the Code of One-Hit Wonders
By Derek Thompson  The Atlantic  April 17, 2022

"...For decades, psychologists have puzzled over the ingredients of creative popularity by studying music, because the medium offers literally millions of data points....Stanford psychologist Justin Berg...compiled a data set of more than 3 million songs released from 1959 to 2010 and pulled out the biggest hits. He used an algorithm...to measure the songs' sonic features...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").

"Novelty is a double-edged sword....Being very different from the mainstream is really, really bad for your likelihood of initially making a hit when you?re not well known. 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....

"Berg's research also found that musical variety (as opposed to novelty) was useful for artists [to find a niche] before they broke out. But down the line, variety wasn't very useful, possibly because audience expectations are set by initial hits...[But] the difference between one-hit wonders and hitmakers isn't just novelty; it's also focus, or what Berg called "relatedness." Hot streaks require creative people to mine deeply when they find something that works for them."

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/shania-twain-creativity-one-hit-wonder/629569/

[PJ Post]

Yep.

The same concepts apply to branding.

We can use the concept of breaking out (an unexpected novelty success) as the birth of the brand, that is, this is the point where the artist's earlier variety is replaced by focused novelty (one lane).

They then continue to offer the thing that they are known for (relatedness/deep mining) to build success.

And then, once they (the brand) has become successful enough, they can try new things - a return to novelty (known as extending the life cycle). However, often these new ideas are successful, not because of anything specific to this new novelty, but because the brand itself has achieved critical mass - most anything they do will be well received, generally speaking.

We can use Johnny Cash's version of Hurt as an example. I would argue this song's success is attributable to Cash's performance vis a vis his legacy - something quite unique, but deeply anchored in the artist's brand (authenticity and vulnerability), which makes the performance extremely familiar even though the song itself may not be (relatedness adjacent).

[The Bass Bagwhan]

It amuses me that it requires a Stanford Psychologist to apparently discover this through an exhaustive study when all that was needed was to buy me (or any other author/musician) a pint of beer at the pub and ask.