UCI Podcast: What makes a hit?

The most common nickname for it was “Barbenheimer” ­– an opening weekend in which “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” both expected to be two of the top grossing films of 2023, opened concurrently, combining for $244 million and over 78% of the overall domestic box office.

Why did fans flock to the theaters for those films? Meantime, Swifties worldwide continue to break the internet when tickets go on sale for her Eras tour.

Noah Askin has devoted his career to answering the bigger picture question around these pop culture phenomena: what makes a hit? The assistant professor of teaching in the academic area of organization and management in UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business focuses his research on the production and consumption of culture, and the creative process.

In this UCI Podcast, Askin describes how he scoured the Billboard charts to investigate which characteristics of songs lead to their being a “hit” and examined why bands were able to demonstrate sustained success over long-running careers. He also shares how general themes of creativity and collaboration seamlessly cross over from pop culture into professional networks and community relationships.

This episode of the UCI Podcast was recorded in the podcast studio in the ANTrepreneur Center. Music for this episode of the UCI Podcast, titled “Stars Align,” provided by The 126ers via the Audio Library in YouTube Studio.

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TRANSCRIPT

The UCI Podcast/Cara Capuano:

From the University of California, Irvine, I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UCI Podcast.

Traditionally, summertime brings blockbusters to the big screen. As the nation emerged from the long shadow cast by the pandemic last summer, “Top Gun: Maverick” brought people back into theaters, a trend that continued into the holiday season when “Avatar: The Way of Water” became the top grossing film of 2022.

What will be the biggest movies this year? What about the biggest TV shows, the top songs, or the new musical groups that we should all pay attention to? Fortunately, UC Irvine has someone who can provide well-researched rationale to help answer those questions – a veritable pop culture expert.

Our guest today is Noah Askin, assistant professor of teaching in the academic area of organization and management in UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business. A computational social scientist and sociologist by training, Professor Askin’s research includes the production and consumption of culture. He’s particularly interested in the creative process, its outcomes and the forces that influence it. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today, Professor Askin.

Noah Askin:

Thank you for so much for having me, Cara. I really appreciate it.

Capuano:

In 2017, you co-authored an article for the American Sociological Review titled “What Makes Popular Culture Popular?” Let’s start our conversation there because it’s a rather huge question. What did you find when you were exploring answers to that?

Askin:
Good question. And I think the title probably overstates the case to some extent – but sometimes in academia you have to make these kinds of claims – and we were interested in what was it about cultural objects, in this case, popular songs that made them successful. Right? There’s so much culture being produced, whether you’re talking about music or movies or TV shows or TikTok clips, you know, just so much being produced. And so, we wanted to try to unpack and figure out what makes certain ones stand out, rise to the top of the pile, et cetera.

Capuano:
There is a terrific Ted Talk available on YouTube for any listeners who want to learn more about that study. Just search “Noah Askin” on YouTube. Over 171,000 people have already checked it out, and I know I learned a lot the idea of different measurables that could be applied in song. And as you said, that study examines music. Could similar measurables be applied to ascertaining what makes a super popular film or a television show?

Askin:

Sure. Obviously, there’s different forms of investment that go into the production and then marketing of all these different things, but I think what we were able to do with music was to get access to the features of songs. And so, we’re not just looking at who’s the artist, although obviously that has something to do with it, and we’re not just looking at what label puts it out, although that obviously has something to do with it. But we can actually say something meaningful about the content of the song itself and how that contributes or doesn’t contribute to success.

And so, if you think about the analogous opportunities in film and television, it’s thinking about what kind of features would you be interested in – plot lines and genres and types of dialogue, and what do the visuals look like? There are ways now with machine learning and other sources of data that allow you to kind of take these cultural objects and decompose them into their constituent parts. And to then be able to say, “How do these compare to what else is available right now? How do these compare to what’s come before?”

And by doing so, you can start to come up with a sense of, alright, well what is it that has made things stand out and be successful in the past? And maybe we can start to say something about having a sense of “this is what’s available now,” so we can then figure out whether something new entering into that context is going to be successful or not.

Capuano:
How much of something’s success has to do with the person producing it? What did you learn from your study from music that maybe told you, “This is a hit because it’s Adele, or this is a hit because it’s somebody that nobody knows, but it’s something they really like to listen to?” What’s the differentiation there?

Askin:
Sure. So, I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what the actual sort of quantified amount is.

Capuano:

Right…

Askin:

However, we know that people that are more familiar to audiences have a head start. Right? They’re much more familiar. People are more likely to just check out whatever new thing that they’re putting out because of existing familiarity, popularity, again, marketing dollars and things like that. Tours. And there’s absolutely an advantage, right?

And you see this in the way that Hollywood will produce films ­– you know, latch onto a marketable star. Tom Cruise’s – I think – seventh “Mission Impossible” is coming out now. Marvel has made 457 movies around their characters. And so, there’s something to be said about that familiarity that gives a head start. Although that only gets songs and movies and television shows so far.

I still believe that something creative, interesting, new, slightly differentiated will drive something from being okay that did pretty well to no, no, no, this is actually meaningful both artistically and financially.

Capuano:
Those are tough decisions for the studios to make, I would think, because if you’re backing a Tom Cruise or a Harrison Ford who just completed the fifth Indiana Jones, you’re putting a lot of financial investment into the idea that that star power is going to help get a return on that investment.

Askin
Yep. And if you think there’s the old adage in business: “You never get fired for buying IBM.” That’s a bit of a dated reference, but the idea is that you go with what’s safe and to some extent that gets you, first of all, plausible deniability should something go wrong. Well, this all looked like it should have been safe, given what we knew. But it also means your table stakes are kind of met out of the gate. Now, again, I don’t know that that necessarily is going to bring you up and over the top, right?

If you think about “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull,” like maybe not the greatest artistic piece of cinema, and I’m sure it did fine –I don’t know the box office numbers off the top of my head – but it wasn’t something like “Raiders.” It wasn’t something like “The Last Crusade,” which, in addition to having a marketable star – certainly by the time “The Last Crusade” came around – it had actually really compelling plot. It was campy, it was fun. And so those are movies that are really well remembered and continue to be considered part of sort of the canon, whereas I’m not sure “Crystal Skull” is, despite having this marketable star there. So, it’s above and beyond just that decision.

Capuano:
Those are big decisions for the studios and the music producers to make. Your latest publication is in Administrative Science Quarterly and it has a pun-tastic title that I absolutely adore: “Recognition killed the radio star? Recognition orientations and sustained creativity after the Best New Artist Grammy nomination.” How would you describe that work?

Askin:
The basic idea is a lot of academic research on creativity tends to focus on creativity in a moment. Like, let’s get a bunch of people together – or one person – and have them come up with a bunch of ideas or a bunch of uses for something, and then measuring that creatively. And so, what we set out to do was to figure out what happens to creativity in groups over the long run? Because lots of creative production happens in groups, and oftentimes those groups stay together. And so, we were interested in figuring out, alright, so you get a group together – in this this case, this is a band – and you get recognized for being creative, right? The Best New Artist Grammy. And we chose a time period in the eighties because these groups had been around long enough to potentially be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So, there’s a long lifespan there.

And we wanted to figure out: if you’re recognized for creativity, what does that do to subsequent creativity? And it turns out that most groups kind of crumble under the weight of that acknowledgement. Even if they didn’t win the Grammy, simply being nominated means you become the focus of attention. Everybody wants kind of a piece of you and groups have a tough time rekindling the magic that got them recognized for creativity in the first place.

There are a handful of groups who are able to kind of insulate themselves and stick to their process, stick to each other, pace themselves accordingly. And actually, in the long run, that makes them more likely to be recognized and successful creatively for decades to follow. And so, we were just interested in figuring out what happens when there’s this intervention of recognition for creativity to subsequent creative output.

Capuano:
You know, it’s interesting because that’s almost counterintuitive.

Askin:

Mm-hmm.

Capuano:

You would think that getting a recognition like the Best New Artist would be essentially a brick laid in the foundation of making a castle of success. And that’s not necessarily the case.

Askin:
Yeah. And there, there is this kind of folk theory, folk wisdom that it’s a “Best New Artist Grammy curse” because it sets these expectations, and it means that a lot of these external influences start trying to become a part of the creative process of the group that was nominated. And the fact that there’s all these different voices that there is not necessarily the strong foundation, the strong mechanism within the groups themselves to be able to effectively process or block those means that it creates more trouble than potential upside.

Now that doesn’t mean they don’t ultimately sell well, especially for a subsequent album or two, but the sort of critic’s perspective on their creativity and their longevity tends to suffer as a result of that early recognition.

Capuano:
What is the secret recipe then for the sustainability of the success from your findings?

Askin:
Basically, we show that the bands that kind of use that recognition as currency to buy themselves their own time, their own process, their own insular patterns of creation and creativity, is really what allows them to be successful. It’s almost ­– we call it “insulating” – an “insulating orientation.” They block out the recognition and everything that comes with it, and they kind of disregard it.

In the paper, we use Sade one of the exemplars of a band that was nominated and ultimately ended up using that nomination and recognition to say, “Okay, we now get to do what we want because we’ve demonstrated that we’re good enough.” And so, they kind of don’t pay much attention to it. And so, there’s much more spacing between their albums, much more focus on each other as opposed to the recognition. And they feel a connection to the fans, but they don’t feel like the fans and the labels and all these other external voices get to say something in their process. Like, that’s up to them to do what they want to do when they want to do it and how they want to do it.

Capuano:
I looked up the artists from 1980 to 1990 that you studied…

Askin:

Yep…

Capuano:

To see who I felt had the sustainability power…

Askin:

Yeah…

Capuano:

… I don’t know that Sade would be one that I’d list alongside, say Cyndi Lauper and Culture Club, even Christopher Cross…

Askin:

Yeah.

Capuano:

… who I feel like are artists that maybe had a little bit more sustained presence in that super pop culture and were making hits on, for example, the Billboard 100. Am I reading that wrong?

Askin:
Yeah. I think if you look at album sales – especially global success, Sade has been phenomenally successful.

Capuano:
Oh, I know internationally, Sade is huge.

Askin:
And so yeah… in the U.S., perhaps not ­­– although there’ve been a number of hits from subsequent albums, I think everybody sort of typically goes to “Smooth Operator” as being the one hit, which was the sort of big launch. But ultimately, they’ve had I think six or seven albums –don’t quote me on that – and have all done well. They’ve all been very well received. They all get strong critical praise for what they’re doing. And so, it’s been this kind of slow and steady, but ultimately successful in the long run, career.

Capuano:
That’s fantastic.

Askin:

Yeah!

Capuano:

And of course, now you’ve motivated me to put Sade on my favorite streaming service on my ride home, so that I can get to know more than just the very memorable “Smooth Operator.”

Askin:

Yeah, yeah.

Capuano:

I see you have another abstract called “Where do new ideas come from? The social foundations of creativity in music.” What is that research investigating? 

Askin:

That one, we tried to be very direct in what we’re doing in the title. And the idea is that, again, the way that creativity is often explored is, well, there’s either sort of the lone genius or people will set up these circumstances – a lab, a business, whatever – where people interact directly with each other. And that’s what generates creativity. It’s either this lone genius or a bunch of people interacting.

And I am all for the idea that collaboration and working with other people inspires creativity and generates great creative outcomes. The challenge is, so much of our creative influence comes from sort of what’s in the ether. Like, if you’re a musician, what are you listening to? Who are the old musicians that inspire you? What are the places that inspire you? And it’s just, it’s been very difficult historically to capture these things in any kind of empirical or quantitative way and say, can we actually devise a series of analyses that tries to get at what is the level of influence that a record label has on creative output or that a genre has on an artist’s creative output?

And so, we’re actually able to do that, and we compare the level of creative influence on individual song output of who an artist collaborates with – so, sort of the traditional way of looking at it – but also what genre they’re a part of, what location geographically they’re recording in and inspired by, and then what rate record label they’re part of. And basically, the idea is that you have as, as somebody who creates anything, there’s all these different spheres of influence that you draw from.

And so, what we’re trying to do is actually say, we think that we can capture and measure and say something meaningful about this. And ultimately, in this research, we show that actually genres play a huge role in defining how much creative freedom you have or don’t have. And so, the creative inspiration – being in genres with other creative artists, even if you don’t know them, but they’re kind of informing what you can perform and what’s allowed and what’s not allowed and what’s new – that actually is a really strong indicator of creative inspiration.

Capuano:
How many genres are there in music?

Askin:
It really depends on who you ask. So, there are sort of these big umbrella genres: rock and pop and blues and jazz. And with the creation of all the different streaming services and the data that’s available now, you could actually go… so, one of the data scientists who works for Spotify has this website called Every Noise at Once. It’s just everynoise.com. And it’s this collection of genres that are basically generated through machine learning processes. And he has something like – I’m going to get this wrong – like 4,000 different genres and subgenres at this point.

And what’s really cool is it’s super interactive and you can go and you can click on each genre and see who the different artists are, and you can listen to what an example of a song from that genre sounds like. And so, you can go really as broad and have, you know, a dozen or 20 or so kind of umbrella genres, or you can go very, very, very niche and like, you know, Polish hip hop is a very, very specific genre – and I’m sure there’s even sub genres within that. And you can get to thousands.

Capuano:
Are you a musician?

Askin:
Very mediocre, like aggressively mediocre musician. I grew up playing piano for 15 years or whatever it is, haven’t played much since. And then, being kind of a middle-aged white guy with a beard, of course, I now play acoustic guitar. Again, just decent enough that my young kids don’t know that I’m terrible.

Capuano:
So what drew you to this? If you’re not, like ­– you don’t sound terribly obsessed with music from a performance standpoint, but certainly from a research standpoint.

Askin:
So I have been obsessed with music for as long as I can remember. Listening, going to shows. And so, as a consumer of music, that’s always been a thing.

And I actually grew up playing a game called “The Game.” It’s basically “Name That Tune,” but it’s “Named That Artist.” And so, before everybody had Spotify or radios that would tell you who the artist is, my father would flip through the stations and whoever named the artist singing first got a point. You played until 10 points. And I –by about age six or seven – I was able to beat him, you know, just using the radio. And my sister as well –my sister works in the music industry. And so there was just kind of this current of listening to and appreciating and loving music in our house.

And I think when I was going into academia, knowing that I was going to be researching something and spending huge amounts of time over potentially decades, it had to be something that I really cared about and was interested in and was passionate about. And so, using music as this context to ask questions about organizations more generally, about industries more generally, about creativity and the creative process, I thought was just something that would keep me interested and motivated for long enough time to be able to really dig in and do the necessary work that that’s required to do academic research.

Capuano:
Are you “that dad” now, trying to pass on your love of music to your children?

Askin:
Oh, yes. Oh yes. I derive a tremendous amount of pride and enjoyment from the fact that my five-year-old can identify a Beatles song and who’s singing – which Beatle is singing –just from what’s playing. I will prompt him and he’s like, “Oh, this, that’s easy. That’s Paul.” Like, he just gets it. And I’m like, “Ah! This – some portion of my job as a father –has been successful.”

Capuano:
My work here is done.

Askin:

Yeah, exactly.

Capuano:

All the music that you’ve listened to, all of this research that you’ve done, the one thing I think that would make researching popular culture such a challenge is the subjectivity of it.

Askin:

Mm-hmm.

Capuano:

Everyone has different tastes and different things that appeal to them, so it’s hard really even to define what’s a hit.

Askin:
Yep. And there’s this famous study on screenwriters from the nineties where basically they interviewed a whole bunch of studio heads, and one of the quotes, that’s the title of the paper, is “All Hits Are Flukes.” It’s because nobody knows in advance, right? They’re getting better at predicting. But as you get better at predicting, there’s more niches available, there’s different audiences that are now interested in lots of different niches because there’s so many channels through which people get their culture that it’s even harder now to predict what’s going to be a hit, because trying to achieve something with mass popularity is just so, so hard now.

Capuano:
And then along the way ­– obviously musical influence is one thing – but we got to a point in music history where there was just direct sampling of tracks and riffs. And then once that happened, if you sample, for example, a Stevie Wonder song ­– I would imagine he’s one of the most sampled artists in the world of R&B, – you add a little Stevie into your song, and all of a sudden what might not have been a hit could be a hit. And that’s hard to gauge.

Askin:
Yep. And then that opens up the whole can of worms around rights and songwriting credits and royalties. But yes, the little bits of familiarity help drive intrigue and interest. And what we found in that first paper that you mentioned was it’s this balance – this optimal differentiation. So, similar enough to what else is out there so that people don’t feel alienated by it, but differentiated so that it actually stands out and you can latch onto it.

It’s not the most mind-blowing revelation, but if you think about what are the cultural artifacts, songs, shows, movies that really stand out? Usually, at least when they’re first released, it’s not the super far out there pieces, right? Those tend to grab a little foothold and maybe eventually create the space in the future for the things that follow them to become more mainstream. But what kind of hits in a moment is something that is familiar enough to be broadly interesting to a lot of people, but differentiated enough so that it actually has something you can grab onto – something new, unique, a different voice, a different perspective, a different sound, just enough to make it stand out from the crowd.

Capuano:
What else are you working on?

Askin:
Mostly stuff related to music. Looking at basically what are market conditions that allow new genres to pop up. So, is it about having more diversity in the marketplace that allows something new, a new sound, a new lyrical set of themes that kind of forms the foundation of a genre to arise? Or is it when there’s homogeneity and people are just in dire need of something new and different? And so, working on, again, using the quantitative data in our all of the song for all the songs that we have to try to figure that out.

And then completely separately from this, although related for this “collaboration and networks” idea, working on a bunch of stuff on connections and connectivity. How do people actually deeply connect with each other? How do they build community? How do they use that to develop relationships more fully? A little bit out of left field, considering what we’ve been talking about up to this point, but given my background in networks, these are the two streams: one is networks and music and creativity, and one is network social networks and how people connect with each other and utilize those connections for their benefit.

Capuano
Is there any kind of a crossover where your research interests into the music and the creativity somehow aligns with what you’re finding about networks and collaboration?

Askin:
Sure. Trying basically to decompose and pull apart what is going on when people collaborate with each other that is enabling creative output. Is it simply that you’re super creative and so you and I work together, and you inspire me because it pushes us to higher levels of what’s possible and therefore being more creative? Or is it that you open up new avenues and new sounds that I never heard before based on your background and what you’ve done before? And so, is it about interpersonal inspiration or is it about introduction to new and different sounds and genres and, and creative spaces? And so, trying to figure out what goes on between groups of people when collaborating that leads to greater creativity.

Capuano:
That’s very cool. Did you ever think that we’d see Taylor Swift break the internet repeatedly because going to her concert is apparently the experience that all youth in America need to have this year? What is this all about? It’s crazy.

Askin:
It is! And it’s not just America – they just did it in France. Ticketmaster France basically shut down because of challenges and overload for demand for her concert there, which I believe doesn’t happen till next summer.

Capuano:

Wow.

Askin:

So, the tickets went on sale, crashed the system, and you know, at the same time, Beyoncé just launched a huge tour. And literally there are country-level governments that are anticipating the arrival of these two tours as being huge economic boosts for the economy that of their country, because these two stars are coming to town. So, it goes far beyond music and really trickles into all areas of public life.

Capuano:

The power of music is indomitable. Thank you so much for joining us today, professor Askin. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.

Askin:
Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

Capuano:
For the latest UCI News, please visit our recently redesigned website, news.uci.edu. I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to our conversation, which we recorded at the studio of UCI’s ANTrepreneur Center. The UCI Podcast is a production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.