Blogs are hitting their stride in the media game. Pop music has been around longer. So we should have a pretty good handle on what would make a song a winner, right?

Nope. This short New Scientist piece describes the difficulty of predicting what songs will become hits.

To some degree, the popularity of a song is influenced by the, um, popularity of the song. Participants of one study, for example,

tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.

But what researchers can’t figure out is what gets a trend going in the first place. Sociologist Matthew Salganik, Columbia University, is given the last word in the piece:

“Even if you haven’t made it yet, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s low quality music; you could just be unlucky. But it also suggests that even if it’s high quality music, you might not become successful.”

So that’s it. It’s luck. lol