The Science of Hit Songs

In order to make a hit song, repetitive beats and catchy lyrics are two main necessary features.  Aside from the production aspect, the high popularity of a pop song is essential to create a success for the song. It is important for music listeners to constantly listen to a song so that the song would expose through different media more often. It seems that the key is to increase the people’s attention of a song. Based on the research of Matthew Salganik (2006), a sociologist at Columbia University, we know that music listeners’ music choice often influences by other exterior factors such as their friends and previous data of the songs. He conducted an experiment which he assigned two groups, “independent’ group and “social influence” group. The result shows that people with previous resources of a song would tend to pick the songs which more people listen to. He claims that since there are too many songs in the music world, people do not have time to listen to all of them. An easy way is to follow what others listen to in order to decide if they like it. Also, he mentions that hit songs are like a trend. They indicate what the most popular fashion and beats recently. Lots of people would choose to listen to the hit songs in order to communicate with their friends. I think it is reasonable because people’s taste does affect by the surroundings. For example, since we live in the same house and cook together everyday, my roommates and I are influencing each other in terms of living habit and eating taste. This all reflects that we are trying to convert ourselves to create a living style that is suitable for us. We sometimes did not even notice we changed under other people’s influence.