Popular tastes in music have long had the power to perplex. What can possibly explain the public's fascination with Madonna; the odd enthusiasm for Milli Vanilli; the stark raving madness over David Cassidy or Justin Bieber? Why does one bit of embarrassing fluff breeze to the top of the charts while a thousand other bits of embarrassing fluff sink into blessed obscurity?
Go back 150 years and those very questions were already being asked. “I have sometimes tried, but in vain, to discover the law which regulates the attainment of extreme popularity," lamented Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd in Fraser's Magazine. Popularity was “a very arbitrary thing," he observed, pointing to the outsize success in his day of a cockney ditty called “The Ratcatcher's Daughter"—a song “without a thing to recommend it, with no music, no wit, no sentiment, nothing but vulgar brutality." And yet, for all these manifest defects, it could be heard everywhere. Plus ça change.
What puzzled Mr. Boyd wasn't just the sheer awfulness of the entertainments the crowd liked, but that there was no sense to it. “I defy any person to predict a priori what book, or song, or play, or picture, is to become the rage," he wrote. Now, at long last, a professor at Emory University is claiming that, at least when it comes to popular music, he has harnessed the power of science to predict what will succeed and what will fail.
Go back 150 years and those very questions were already being asked. “I have sometimes tried, but in vain, to discover the law which regulates the attainment of extreme popularity," lamented Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd in Fraser's Magazine. Popularity was “a very arbitrary thing," he observed, pointing to the outsize success in his day of a cockney ditty called “The Ratcatcher's Daughter"—a song “without a thing to recommend it, with no music, no wit, no sentiment, nothing but vulgar brutality." And yet, for all these manifest defects, it could be heard everywhere. Plus ça change.
What puzzled Mr. Boyd wasn't just the sheer awfulness of the entertainments the crowd liked, but that there was no sense to it. “I defy any person to predict a priori what book, or song, or play, or picture, is to become the rage," he wrote. Now, at long last, a professor at Emory University is claiming that, at least when it comes to popular music, he has harnessed the power of science to predict what will succeed and what will fail.
