“A Stanford Psychologist Says He’s Cracked the Code of One-Hit Wonders: What Separates Blind Melon from Shania Twain?”, 2022-04-17 (; backlinks):
In September 1992, the band Blind Melon released their self-titled debut album. The record was mostly ignored until a music video for the song “No Rain”, featuring a girl in glasses dressed as a bumblebee, went berserk on MTV. The song rocketed up the Billboard Hot 100 charts. But that was the last time the band ever struck gold. 2 decades later, Rolling Stone named “No Rain” one of the biggest one-hit wonders of all time.
Soon after Blind Melon topped the charts, another artist had a breakout moment. Shania Twain released her second album, The Woman in Me, which included the No. 1 hit “Any Man of Mine”. Whatever the polar opposite of a one-hit wonder is, that’s what Shania Twain turned out to be. She became one of the most consistent hitmakers of her era, and the only female artist ever with 3 straight albums certified Diamond, meaning more than 10 million copies sold.
…He used an algorithm developed by the company EchoNest to measure the songs’ sonic features, including key, tempo, and danceability. This allowed him to quantify how similar a given hit is to the contemporary popular-music landscape (which he calls “novelty”), and the musical diversity of an artist’s body of work (“variety”).
“Novelty is a double-edged sword”, Berg told me. “Being very different from the mainstream is really, really bad for your likelihood of initially making a hit when you’re not well known. But once you have a hit, novelty suddenly becomes a huge asset that is likely to sustain your success.” Mass audiences are drawn to what’s familiar, but they become loyal to what’s consistently distinct.
Blind Melon’s “No Rain” rated extremely low on novelty in Berg’s research. Dreamy, guitar-driven soft rock wasn’t exactly innovative in 1992. According to Berg, this was the sort of song that was very likely to become a one-hit wonder: It rose to fame because of a quirky music video, not because the song itself stood out for its uniqueness. After that hit, the band struggled to distinguish their sound from everything else that was going on in music.
By contrast, Twain’s breakout hit rated high on novelty in Berg’s research. She was pioneering a new pop-country crossover genre that was bold for her time but would later inspire a generation of artists, like Taylor Swift. “Twain is a great fit for the model, because her blending of pop and country was so original before she had her breakout”, Berg told me. After her second album, he said, her novelty, which had previously been an artistic risk, helped her retain listeners. She could experiment within the kingdom of country-pop without much competition from other artists, and this allowed her to dominate the charts for the next decade.
Berg’s research also found that musical variety (as opposed to novelty) was useful for artists before they broke out. But down the line, variety wasn’t very useful, possibly because audience expectations are set by initial hits. “After the first hit, the research showed that it was good for artists to focus on what I call relatedness, or similarity of music”, he said. Nobody wants Bruce Springsteen to make a rap album.