How to have a pop culture hit like La La Land and Rae Sremmurd

How do you make a hit? This is the question I have posed to dozens of entertainment executives, pop-culture historians and academics over the past few years. Some of them claimed to know. Others maintained that such knowledge was impossible. But the most interesting things I learned weren’t the variables of some mythic formula, but rather how the shifting rules of cultural popularity are a window into the way the world works, and how it is changing.

If the media revolution of the past generation could be summed up in one word, it would be “more”. The number of opportunities for artists and creators has soared as the internet opened new markets around the world and made possible new media, such as self-published ebooks, and technology, such as ever-cheaper cameras and video-editing software. But the sheer supply of creativity has made breakout success more difficult in just about every industry. In 2000, more than 90% of new television shows survived to year two; today, 50% of shows are cancelled before their second birthday. Despite the surge in new films – which have increased by a factor of seven since the early 80s – Americans bought 200m fewer movie tickets in 2016 than in 2002. Little surprise, then, that we are living in a heyday of flops: 27 of the 30 biggest box-office bombs in Hollywood history have come out since 2005.

Every minute of every day, audiences make decisions not only about what to see and hear, but also about what to ignore. It falls to hitmaking companies to insinuate themselves into that permanent tug-of-war and wrest a moment of our focus from the distraction. Here are just a few of the ways in which they do it.

1 The nostalgia instinct: people don’t want new things. They want old things made new again

Last year, the three highest-grossing movies in the UK were sequels to blockbusters. As I write, the last two British box-office champions were Rogue One, a prequel to a 1970s space fantasy, and La La Land, an ode to 1950s musicals.

There is something special about the marriage of old and new in culture. It is aesthetically refreshening to confront something that is both novel and comprehensible. Metacognitive psychologists have a term, “fluency”, which means ease of thinking. Fluent ideas are easier to process and this makes people feel good about themselves. But the effect is strongest when it emerges from its counterpoint, “disfluency”, or difficulty of thinking. That would describe, for example, the phenomenon of watching a complex mystery thriller and being rewarded with the conclusive “a-ha!” moment of discovering the killer’s true identity.

For this reason, perhaps, audiences enjoy the interplay between the strange and the familiar. La La Land is the story of a young man trying to bring back jazz for a new age, in a movie by a young director trying to bring back the musical for a new age. It is both modern, in its setting and idioms, and unapologetically old-fashioned in concept, choreography and lighting. It is, in a way, the converse of the blockbuster musical Hamilton – not an old story with distinctly modern music, but a modern story told in a classic style.

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But nostalgia is one level deeper than familiarity. It is not just a reminiscence, but a return. People enjoy repeating cultural experiences, not only because they want to remember the art, but also because they want to remember themselves. “The dynamic linkages between one’s past, present and future experiences through the reconsumption of an object allow existential understanding,” Cristel Antonia Russell and Sidney J Levy wrote in their academic study of nostalgia and culture. “Re-engaging with the same object, even just once, allows a reworking of experiences as consumers consider their own particular enjoyments and understandings of choices they have made.”

To be sure, pop culture has always had an eye on the past. In the middle of the 20th century, Hollywood produced innumerable western films in homage to a cowboy frontier that was a distant memory. But in the past 20 years, its entire business has come to revolve around multi-sequel franchises. Familiarity – or audience “preawareness” – used to be a part of the industry. Now it’s the whole strategy. In 1996, none of the 10 biggest films (including Independence Day and The First Wives Club) were sequels or superhero films. In each year so far this decade, most of the top-10 international films were sequels, prequels or adaptations.

2 The superstar effect: hits used to be exceptions. Now they are a business model

Three decades ago, the economist Sherwin Rosen wrote a paper called The Economics of Superstars, which argued that technology would give unusually talented people in entertainment and sports access to a global market. As a result, stars would get richer than ever. A brilliant singer should make more money from a virtual stadium of several million worldwide fans than from a physical stadium of several hundred attendees.

The same principle now applies to the world of cultural products. The age of abundant flops has also been a time of astronomical blockbusters. Hit movies and songs now command a larger share of their market than before. The top 1% of bands and solo artists now earn about 80% of all recorded music revenue, and the 10 songs that have spent the most time on the Billboard Hot 100 were all released after 1991. The journalist Jesse Rifkin reported that 2015 had the greatest box-office inequality of any year in more than a decade.

Why has modern pop culture lent itself to such clustering? Technology and globalisation may play a role, as Rosen predicted. But there is something else – the twin forces of social influence and social media.

Today’s markets have transparent tastes. Before we buy a mop on Amazon, we know how many people have rated it and how many stars it has. Before we listen to a song on Spotify, we know its play count. Before we see a movie, we can read a review from our favourite film critic, and check the global review average on Metacritic. This way, consumers can orient their purchases toward the most popular products.

All information is marketing, but information about popularity is extremely powerful marketing. In one experiment, the researchers Duncan Watts, Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds designed several music websites with 48 songs and asked users to download their favourites. Some of these sites had rankings, and some did not. They found that online rankings acted like popularity steroids: people who could see them were more likely to download songs that were already popular.

When everybody knows what everybody else is watching, reading, buying and thinking, it encourages people to cluster around the same few products and ideas. In a transparent and international market for cultural products, all hits are global.

3 The empire strikes back (kind of). The old dogs are learning new tricks

The internet was supposed to lead to the triumph of the long tail and the demise of the gatekeepers. What has happened is a bit more complicated.

In an age of abundant media options, the power of marketing and distribution to cut through the clutter has proved critical. And the organisations with the biggest, broadest audiences are still the old guard – the movie studios, TV networks and record labels.

Although some people envisioned whippersnappers on Snapchat and YouTube replacing TV stars, what has happened is that entertainment companies have learned to use social media as a talent incubator. In the US, several television shows, including Workaholics on Comedy Central and Adam Ruins Everything on TruTV, have built themselves around YouTube celebrities. Two of the most popular and critically acclaimed comedies – HBO’s Insecure and Comedy Central’s Broad City – grew out of lo-fi web series starring young quirky women flailing through their 20s.

The same thing is happening in music. Two decades ago, the way to make a song popular was brute, top-down marketing. Labels curried favour with DJs (sometimes by offering bribes for airplay) and radio exposure reliably translated to chart-topping popularity. But now that young audiences are more likely to find music on Spotify, YouTube and social media, how does a record label boost popularity? 

By piggy-backing on the social networks. When the hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd released their single Black Beatles, the label Interscope went looking for a meme that the song could soundtrack. They found it in the mannequin challenge, a social phenomenon where a group of people freeze in place as a video camera winds between them, as if meandering between a set of mannequins. Interscope marketers worked to associate the track with the meme and, weeks later, Black Beatles went to No 1 in the US.

In other words, the social-media revolution didn’t take down the old media empires. Instead, the empires learned to co-opt the new media.

There is a beguiling sense that, in the age of abundance, the internet has destroyed the gatekeepers and populism’s victory has been absolute. But it’s precisely because today’s hits are so often adaptations of existing franchises that the biggest hit-makers are the organisations that already own those stories.