Invisible Influence (6 page)

“
Oh baby, baby, how was I supposed to know . . . ?

And with that, in early fall 1998, the world met one Britney Jean Spears.

“. . .
Baby One More Time” was more than just an introduction. It was a breakthrough hit. The song broke international sales records and is one of the best-selling singles of all time.
Billboard
magazine named it the best music video of the 1990s and it was voted the third most influential video in the history of pop music. Britney's album, of the same name, went fourteen times platinum in the United States and sold over 30 million units worldwide. It's the best-selling album by a teenage solo artist, and one of the best-selling albums of all time.

All in all, not a bad start.

But
. . . Baby One More Time
was merely a precursor of things to come. Her second album,
Oops! . . . I Did It Again
, became the fastest-selling female album ever. Her third album debuted as number one on the
Billboard
Top 200.

Whether you like her music or not, Britney Spears is one of the most famous pop icons of the early twenty-first century. In addition to a Grammy, Britney won nine
Billboard
music awards, six MTV Video Music Awards, and was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her tours have grossed over $400 Million, and she is the only artist in history to have both a number one album and a number one single in each of the three decades of her career.

Not too shabby.

But just for a second, let's go back to before all that. Before the tours, before the millions of albums, and before her personal life took a turn for the weird. (Remember Kevin Federline?) Even before
. . . Baby One More Time
.

Imagine for a second that we could rerun the world. That we could go back in time and start things anew.

Would Britney still be popular? Would the Princess of Pop still have hit it big?

It's hard to argue with success. After all, Britney wasn't just some one-hit wonder. With over 100 million albums sold, she is one of the best-selling music artists of all time. There must be something about her that made her so successful, right?

Britney had all the telltale signs of someone who would one day be a star. She started dancing at age three. She won talent shows and appeared in commercials at the same age most of us were still learning basic math. She was even cast in
The All New Mickey Mouse Club
, the showcase of teen stardom that launched the likes of Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. Who could have a pedigree like that and not be successful?

When we look at superstars like Britney Spears, we assume that they are profoundly special. That they have some intrinsic talent or inherent quality that led them to hit it big.

If you ask people in the industry why Britney was so successful, they'll say something similar. That Britney had a unique sound. Sure, maybe she wasn't the best singer ever, but she had something going for her. That, combined with snappy dance moves and the right blend of innocence and sex appeal, made her the perfect pop artist. She became a megastar because of those qualities. If you ran the world again, those same qualities would still make her a hit.

Her success was inevitable.

We make similar assumptions about hit movies, books, and other blockbusters. Why did the
Harry Potter
books sell over 450 million copies? They must be great books. “It has all the makings of a classic,” some papers gushed. The “engaging stories” are something “we're wired to respond to,” argued others. Books that sell that many copies must just be higher quality
than the competition. More interesting. Better written. More appealing.

But could these successes be more random than we think?

If artists such as Britney Spears are just better on some dimension, experts should be able to tell. Sure, Britney's music might not be the best technically, but maybe she has the right pop sound to make a hit. So while the critics might belittle her, hit makers know a knockout when they hear it. Industry executives should be able to tell in advance that she would be a superstar.

Same with
Harry Potter
. It's no Chaucer, but when J. K. Rowling shopped
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
around to publishers in the mid-1990s, they should have jumped out of their seats to publish it. Just like an oenophile can tell the difference between a decent cabernet and great one, someone who has spent ten years publishing books should be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe everyday Joes and Janes wouldn't be able to tell, but experts could.

Yet they didn't.

Rowling's original manuscript was rejected by the first twelve publishers who saw it. It was too long, they said. Children's books don't make any money.
Don't quit your day job,
they advised.

And it's not just J. K. Rowling.
Gone with the Wind
was rejected thirty-eight times before it was published. Elvis was told he should go back to driving trucks. Walt Disney was fired early on because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”

Harry Potter
barely even got published. It wasn't until a publisher happened to give the manuscript to his daughter that something changed. The girl nagged her father over and over for months about how great the book was until he made
Rowling an offer. And made her a multimillionaire in the process.

If hits have an inherent quality that separates them from failures, they should be predictable. Maybe not to you, or to me, but at least to industry experts. To people whose job it is to be able to tell the good stuff from the bad.

But what does it mean that even experts get it wrong?

This question vexed Princeton sociologist Matthew Salganik as he was working on his dissertation. Hit books, songs, and movies are so much more successful than their peers that we tend to see them as qualitatively different.

But if the best are distinctly better than the rest, why do experts have so much trouble identifying them? Why did so many publishers pass up the opportunity to sign J. K. Rowling?

To find out, Salganik and his colleagues set up a simple experiment. They designed a website where people could listen to music and download it for free. No famous songs or well-known bands, just unknown songs from unknown artists. Local acts that were just starting out, or groups that had just put together their first demo. Bands with names like Go Mordecai, Shipwreck Union, and 52 Metro.

The songs were organized in a list, one after the other. People could click on any song, listen to it, and, if they liked it, download it. Song order was shuffled for each listener to ensure that each song received equal attention. More than fourteen thousand people participated.

In addition to the names of the bands and the songs, some people were given information about what previous listeners liked. For each song, they could see how many other people had
downloaded it. If 150 people had downloaded “Lockdown” by 52 Metro, for example, the number 150 appeared next to the song.

And just like a best-seller list, for these “social influence” participants the songs were ordered by popularity. The most downloaded song appeared at the top of the list, the next most downloaded second, and so on. The download numbers and song order automatically updated each time a listener downloaded a new song. Then Salganik examined which songs people downloaded.

Simply providing information about others' choices had a big impact. Suddenly people tended to follow their peers. Just like watching a point of light in a dark room, people listened to and downloaded songs that prior listeners had liked.

Popularity became concentrated. The gap between the most and less popular songs increased. Popular songs became more popular and less popular songs got even less attention. The songs stayed the same, but social influence led the best to do better and the worst to do worse.

But Salganik wasn't finished. It was neat to see how people's tendency to imitate others influenced popularity, but that still didn't resolve the prior puzzle. Sure, certain songs or books might be more popular than others, but why couldn't experts armed with market research predict those successes in advance?

To find out, Salganik added one more detail.

It's impossible to rerun the real world. No one can stop time, go back, and see what would happen if things started anew. So instead of rerunning the same world, Salganik created eight different ones. Eight separate worlds, or distinct groups, that looked identical—at least initially.

This decision was key.

The beauty of a good experiment is control. In this case, each of the eight worlds started the same. Everyone had access to the same information. All songs started with zero downloads, and because people were randomly assigned to each world, even the participants in the different words were indistinguishable. So while some people might like punk music, and others might like rap, on average there were an equivalent number of people with each preference in each world. On every dimension possible, then, the worlds started the same.

But while they started the same, each world evolved independently. It was almost as if eight different versions of earth were separately spinning next to one another.

If success were driven by quality alone, each world should end up looking the same. Better songs should be more popular, worse songs should be less popular, and the songs that are popular in one world should be popular in all of them. If 52 Metro's “Lockdown” was the most downloaded song in one world, it should be close to the top of the list in others. On average, preferences across the groups should be the same.

But they weren't.

Song popularity varied widely from one world to the next. 52 Metro's “Lockdown” was the most popular song in one world. In another, one of the least popular. Fortieth out of forty-eight. Almost dead last.

Same song, indistinguishable groups of participants, completely different levels of success. Same initial conditions, different final outcomes.

Why was success so variable?

The reason was social influence. There weren't more punk
lovers in the world where 52 Metro was popular than in the world where it wasn't. But because people tend to follow those who came before them, small, random initial differences snowballed.

To understand why this phenomenon occurs, imagine parking at a county fair. There's no real parking lot per se, or even someone directing traffic, just a big field where people leave their cars. People are generally indifferent about where they park, they just want to go eat cotton candy and ride the Ferris wheel. There are no white lines denoting where individual cars should go, so the first family that drives in can park wherever they want.

The first car that drives up happens to be driven by the West family. They slightly prefer facing west when they park, so they drive in, turn right, and park their car facing west:

Then the second family shows up. This family, the Souths, prefer parking facing south rather than west. But their preference is not that strong, and given that the first car is parked facing west, they pull up next to them and face west as well:

Soon, more and more cars show up. While the people in each might have a slight preference here and there, they follow the cars ahead of them until the parking lot ends up looking like this: