
Hit Makers
The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
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Narrated by:
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Derek Thompson
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By:
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Derek Thompson
About this listen
Nothing "goes viral". If you think a popular movie, song, or app came out of nowhere to become a word-of-mouth success in today's crowded media environment, you're missing the real story. Each blockbuster has a secret history - of power, influence, dark broadcasters, and passionate cults that turn some new products into cultural phenomena. Even the most brilliant ideas wither in obscurity if they fail to connect with the right network, and the consumers that matter most aren't the early adopters but rather their friends, followers, and imitators - the audience of your audience.
In his groundbreaking investigation, Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson uncovers the hidden psychology of why we like what we like and reveals the economics of cultural markets that invisibly shape our lives. Shattering the sentimental myths of hit making that dominate pop culture and business, Thompson shows quality is insufficient for success, nobody has "good taste", and some of the most popular products in history were one bad break away from utter failure. It may be a new world, but there are some enduring truths to what audiences and consumers want. People love a familiar surprise: a product that is bold yet sneakily recognizable.
All businesses, artists, and people looking to promote themselves and their work want to know what makes some works so successful while others disappear. Hit Makers is a magical mystery tour through the last century of pop culture blockbusters and the most valuable currency of the 21st century - people's attention.
From the dawn of impressionist art to the future of Facebook, from Etsy designers to the origin of Star Wars, Derek Thompson leaves no pet rock unturned to tell the fascinating story of how culture happens and why things become popular.
In Hit Makers, Derek Thompson investigates:
- The secret link between ESPN's sticky programming and the The Weeknd's catchy choruses
- Why Facebook is the world's most important modern newspaper
- How advertising critics predicted Donald Trump
- The fifth grader who accidentally launched "Rock Around the Clock", the biggest hit in rock and roll history
- How Barack Obama and his speechwriters think of themselves as songwriters
- How Disney conquered the world - but the future of hits belongs to savvy amateurs and individuals
- The French collector who accidentally created the Impressionist canon
- Quantitative evidence that the biggest music hits aren't always the best
- Why almost all Hollywood blockbusters are sequels, reboots, and adaptations
- Why one year - 1991 - is responsible for the way pop music sounds today
- Why another year - 1932 - created the business model of film
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- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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America was once a country that did big things—we built the world’s greatest rail network, a vast electrical grid, interstate highways, abundant housing, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more. But today, even while facing a host of pressing challenges—a housing shortage, a climate crisis, a dilapidated infrastructure—we feel stuck, unable to move the needle. Why?
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Sort of boring
- By Paul on 03-03-25
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Think Like a Freak
- The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
- By: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
- Narrated by: Stephen J. Dubner
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and offer a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems. The topics range from business to philanthropy to sports to politics, all with the goal of retraining your brain.
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Very little new material - deceptively short
- By Joshua on 05-15-14
By: Steven D. Levitt, and others
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Profiles in Ignorance
- How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber
- By: Andy Borowitz
- Narrated by: Andy Borowitz
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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The winner of the first-ever National Press Club award for humor, Andy Borowitz has been called a “Swiftian satirist” (The Wall Street Journal) and “one of the country’s finest satirists” (The New York Times). Millions of fans and New Yorker readers enjoy his satirical news column “The Borowitz Report”. Now, in Profiles in Ignorance, he offers a witty, spot-on diagnosis of our country’s political troubles by showing how ignorant leaders are degrading, embarrassing, and endangering our nation.
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Fascinating, Familiar and Frightening Tales
- By Shoppy McShopperson on 09-28-22
By: Andy Borowitz
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The Attention Merchants
- The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
- By: Tim Wu
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants", contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions, but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.
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It's Been Sold
- By Mr. Ess on 10-24-16
By: Tim Wu
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Rise of the Filmtrepreneur
- How to Turn Your Indie Film into a Profitable Business
- By: Alex Ferrari
- Narrated by: Alex Ferrari
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s harder today than ever before for independent filmmakers to make money with their films. From predatory film distributors ripping them off to huckster film aggregators who prey upon them, the odds are stacked against the indie filmmaker. The old distribution model for making money with your film is broken, and there needs to be a change.
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8 hundred audiobooks in to my audible experience
- By heber on 10-08-20
By: Alex Ferrari
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Flip the Script
- Getting People to Think Your Idea Is Their Idea
- By: Oren Klaff
- Narrated by: Oren Klaff
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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If there's one lesson Oren Klaff has learned over decades of pitching, presenting, and closing long-shot, high-stakes deals, it's that people are sick of being marketed and sold to. Most of all, they hate being told what to think. The more you push them, the more they resist. What people love, however, is coming up with a great idea on their own, even if it's the idea you were guiding them to have all along. Often, the only way to get someone to sign is to make them feel like they're smarter than you.
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Riveting. BLEW, MY, MIND
- By Justin on 09-19-19
By: Oren Klaff
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The Nineties
- A Book
- By: Chuck Klosterman
- Narrated by: Chuck Klosterman, Dion Graham
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. Landlines fell to cell phones, the internet exploded, and pop culture accelerated without the aid of technology that remembered everything. It was the last era with a real mainstream to either identify with or oppose. The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition, and a shift in consciousness, that we’re still struggling to understand.
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A Very White Middle-class Take On The Nineties
- By Umar Lee on 02-10-22
By: Chuck Klosterman
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How to Make It in the New Music Business (3rd Edition)
- Practical Tips on Building a Loyal Following and Making a Living as a Musician
- By: Ari Herstand
- Narrated by: Ari Herstand
- Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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How to Make It in the New Music Business, since its first publication in 2016, has become the go-to resource for musicians eager to make a living in a turbulent industry. Widely adopted by ambitious individuals and music schools across the world and considered "the best how-to book of its kind" (Music Connection), this essential work has inspired tens of thousands of aspiring artists to stop waiting around for that "big break" and take matters into their own hands.
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If you have anything to do with music...READ THIS!
- By Phillip and Leslie T. on 08-27-23
By: Ari Herstand
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Predictable Success
- Getting Your Organization on the Growth Track - and Keeping It There
- By: Les McKeown
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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No matter what kind of organization you work for, whether it's your own small business or a global Fortune 100 company, your number one goal is success. Predictable Success takes you step-by-step through a startlingly simple, intuitive, and universal process that shows you how to bring sustained, lasting, predictable success to your organization.
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No substance or real solid information to take
- By Desiree Sherbundy on 07-06-22
By: Les McKeown
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The Addiction Formula
- A Holistic Approach to Writing Captivating, Memorable Hit Songs. With 317 Proven Commercial Techniques & 331 Examples
- By: Friedemann Findeisen
- Narrated by: Friedemann Findeisen
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Discover the songwriting technique used in 97% of all hit songs. Music is a tough industry to break into. With production gear being affordable for the first time in history, it seems like everyone is making music these days. Getting noticed in the continuous stream of information that is the Internet seems almost impossible. But: There is a technique designed specifically to captivate and hook an audience and with The Addiction Formula, you can learn it in a couple of hours.
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I’m a successful producer for Sony, and this STILL upped my game.
- By SpookyRockstar on 04-09-18
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Stuck
- How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
- By: Yoni Appelbaum
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village.
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land of opportunity
- By Anonymous User on 03-16-25
By: Yoni Appelbaum
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The Hollow Parties
- The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics
- By: Daniel Schlozman, Sam Rosenfeld
- Narrated by: Tom Beyer
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.
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Too arcane
- By James Larimer on 07-18-24
By: Daniel Schlozman, and others
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The Data Detective
- Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
- By: Tim Harford
- Narrated by: Tim Harford
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics - we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us”.
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I expected more
- By A. Visserman on 03-09-21
By: Tim Harford
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Blockbusters
- Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment
- By: Anita Elberse
- Narrated by: Renee Raudman
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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What's behind the phenomenal success of entertainment businesses such as Warner Bros., Marvel Entertainment, and the NFL — along with such stars as Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, and LeBron James? Which strategies give leaders in film, television, music, publishing, and sports an edge over their rivals? Anita Elberse, Harvard Business School's expert on the entertainment industry, has done pioneering research on the worlds of media and sports for more than a decade. Now, in this groundbreaking audiobook, she explains a powerful truth about the fiercely competitive world of entertainment.
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I love the autobook the only thing I have
- By brycesp on 03-31-17
By: Anita Elberse
What listeners say about Hit Makers
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-10-18
Great resource for creatives striving for success!
As an educator, this book has been a great resource for motivating students to understand their audience and the history of 'hits'! I reference this book almost every day at the college where I teach— it's an important concept for creators who want to make great art AND want to connect with their niche (and, want to make money). Context (and familiarity) are essential in order to connect with others! Love this book!
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3 people found this helpful
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- Andrew
- 09-25-17
A hit!
I've never taken as many notes listening to a book as I did durning this one!
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1 person found this helpful
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- annette henderson
- 04-11-19
great book for business owners
easy to read, compelling if you are interested in the subject, and a perspective altering book for someone who doesn't care about the topic
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1 person found this helpful
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- Nikki
- 09-08-21
Super interesting!
If you’re into Malcolm Gladwell you’ll enjoy this. Well researched and written book about how things go viral.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Wilson
- 02-23-18
Wanted to score higher
The beginning of this book was brilliant. I didn’t want to stop listening. The ending was also quite good. However, in the middle the author chooses to add largely irrelevant material and also decides to get on a soapbox. Not necessarily a bad one, but still not how I wished to spend my time. I would have liked to rate this 3.5. Half stars are not allowed, so I opted to round up rather than down. Much of the info is common sense, but it is still really good info and the nuggets of gold outweigh the negatives.
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- Jesus Aburto
- 10-13-17
mind opening.
Have to play this one again. Each case narrated is full of meaning and wisdom. It does not give a "how to go viral" formula, but a very powerful landscape of how mass media and people's minds work.
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- Joshua
- 10-14-19
Very interesting and entertaining
Loved it! Definitely worth the time. Great perspective on the ideas of what makes a hit.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-21-20
Excellent book!
Love! Love! Love this book. Written and researched so well, narrated well! It doesn't give you any ready made formula to making hits but it gives you the framework and understanding of popularity, culture and history of hits.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-17-18
Great if you're look for fame or to sell an idea
Does a good job at not only telling why some ideas catch on, "go viral", but explains the subtle aspects necessary to become famous or have your product consumed by the masses
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- Petr Meissner
- 02-08-21
Most Advanced Yet Achievable
Explains principles that makes hits hits. Learn next concepts on examples.
We like what we know yet there is an acceptable novelty or challenge in it.
We want unique belonging and familiarly new.
Most Advanced Yet Achievable.
Teenageers seek to be the Most Autonomous Yet Appropriate.
Best story is an emotional rollercoaster.
Fashion matures through: controversy » trend » mainstream » awkwardness.
A popularity is created by a few big broadcasters rather than just a noname crowd.
Value of a social network is its size squared.
We talk 80% of time about ourselves in online vs. 33 % in person.
Culture is how we want to be perceived, not what we really do.
We write about ideal ourselves and want to find ourselves in post of others as well.
YouTube seems more personal than broadcasting though.
People like to share their weirdness in a small group.
Premium TV subscriptions like Netflix allowed more startup-like bets on movies vs. just mainstream likability of broadcast TV.
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