Why do big hits stay big longer?
🎶 On this day in history: Kris Kross’ “Jump” hit №1 song (1992); U2’s The Joshua Tree hit №1 album (1987); the Jackson 5’s “ABC” bumped the Beatles’ “Let It Be” from the top spot (1970); Elvis Presley had his 13th №1 single, “Stuck on You” (1960).
Today: Why big hits stay hits longer, first aids myths, and taking inspiration from Steve Martin’s career
By Scott Lamb
When Billboard updates its sales records next week, Taylor Swift will likely have a new №1 album with The Tortured Poets Department, which would give her a tie with Jay-Z for the second-most №1 albums of all time (14). As we mentioned earlier this week, she’s already set streaming records, so there’s little doubt it will be one of the biggest records of this year. But how will it fare in future?
As Doug Shapiro explains in “Power Laws in Culture,” one of my favorite Medium stories from last year, part of what drives Swift’s current success are her past successes. That’s because of the network effects afforded by the internet, which “fragments attention, [but] also causes cascades that concentrate attention.” One of the ways those cascades happen is giving an advantage to things that already have some signal or recognition (part of the reason behind the endurance of superhero movies, too). There’s more to it — “in a networked environment popularity is influenced by luck and highly sensitive to initial conditions,” Shapiro also says — but in the end, hits still matter. It’s just getting hard to make them, especially as a new artist.
It echoes this surprising bit of data from Keaton Brandt’s piece about the growth of the internet from earlier this year: “For 22 of the 52 weeks in 2023 the top song on the Billboard Hot 100 came from an artist who first topped that chart more than a decade before. The same can be said for only 3 weeks of 2013 and 0 weeks of 2003 and 1993. In other words, at least according to this admittedly small dataset, popular artists are staying popular for longer than ever before.”
What else we’re reading
- No, peeing on a jellyfish sting will not make it hurt less. Leaning backwards does not help stop a nosebleed. These, and 15 other first aid myths, dispelled.
- Wiki Loves Monuments is an annual photo competition focused on historical monuments and heritage sites (and holds the record for being the world’s largest photography competition). The winning entry (below) for 2023 was a shot of the Giza Pyramids in Egypt during “Forever Is Now,” an exhibition fusing contemporary art with ancient Egyptian culture, taken by Mona Hassan Abo-Abda — see the top winners from over 200,000 submissions.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom about (living a full life)
Steve Martin’s wildly varied and successful career serves as an object lesson in the value of just saying yes. “Write a memoir. Make a movie. Sing a song. Take an archery class. Start playing tennis. Roller skate through a museum. Don’t worry about what other people think about you, or what you think anyone else might want or expect. Just go make stuff. You only have so much time. Make it count.”
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Edited and produced by Harris Sockel, Jon Gluck, & Carly Rose Gillis
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