How to tell if a song will sell

Out of the many songs that are made and put out there, how many of them will make the sale? Chances are, your teenagers would know. Well, they do not really know that they know. It had to take a neuroscientist watching American Idol with his young daughters to figure it out.

The neuroscientist was Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist and director of Emory University’s Center for Neuropolicy. It was sort of an accident how he thought of it. In 2006, he and his colleagues did a study on how teenagers’ perception of the popularity of a song is influenced by their peers. They involved brain scans while the 27 kids, aged 12 to 17, listened to 120 songs from Myspace pages. Back then, those songs were still obscure.

Fast forward to 2011 to the time Berns was watching American Idol and he heard the show’s contestant sing “Apologize” by OneRepublic. He recognized that song as one of the songs he used in his 2006 study and something clicked. He thought of going back to his data to see if there were relationships he could detect from the brain scans he took in 2006 and the fate of the songs he used then in terms of their popularity.

And indeed, something turned up. It seemed that activity in parts of the brain associated with rewards and decision-making such as the orbitofrontal cortex and the ventral striatum correlated with the sales of the songs from 2007 to 2010. The results do not go so far as to predict big hits but they did say something about future sales of music. In the 2006 study, the participants were also asked to rate how much they liked the song but the ratings did not correlate with the sales from 2007 to 2010.

This study recently made the headlines because the study only involved 27 brains of teenagers, lighting up on fresh music from MySpace pages, yet it was able to make a connection between where those brains lit up and the amount of copies sold which is a measure of popularity. That age group of the teenagers in the study makes up 20 percent of the music sales market.

This is a growing field in science now — the connection between how our minds feel rewarded and make decisions and actual products and services out there. This is called neuro-marketing and many neuroscientists have actually become consultants to manufacturers to help the latter market their products and services. I am personally fascinated and passionate about learning how our minds work but I am not too keen on totally banking on neural images to predict sales or large-scale decisions.

I think music executives have known this about teenagers far ahead of neuroscientists. They might not have gotten it down to brain scans but they have surely observed how teenagers react to music. Now, neuroscientists are adding to our understanding by pointing out that the brain parts responsible for “reward” play the major role in predicting song popularity.

Looking forward, I want to see future studies find out how “reward” is felt by teenagers in a song. Is it different from how adults’ brains feel rewarded? Do teenagers feel this from repeated exposure, from peer pressure? Would studies on adult brains also be able to predict music sales? As neuroscience itself has informed us through many studies, music is one of those experiences that straddle both the left and right hemispheres, crossing many brain regions. Music literally rocks your entire mind. Do you think we would ever see the day when Billboard charts could be predicted by pictures of our brains on music?

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