by all the sound. Just as the scientists at MIT discovered that behavioral habits prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by the endless decisions we would otherwise have to make each day, listening habits exist because, without them, it would be impossible to determine if we should concentrate on our child’s voice, the coach’s whistle, or the noise from a busy street during a Saturday soccer game. Listening habits allow us to unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored.
That’s why songs that sound “familiar”-even if you’ve never heard them before-are sticky. Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard. When Celine Dion releases a new song-and it sounds like every other song she’s sung, as well as most of the other songs on the radio-our brains unconsciously crave its recognizability and the song becomes sticky. You might never attend a Celine Dion concert, but you’ll listen to her songs on the radio, because that’s what you
This insight helped explain why “Hey Ya!” was failing on the radio, despite the fact that Hit Song Science and music executives were sure it would be a hit. The problem wasn’t that “Hey Ya!” was bad. The problem was that “Hey Ya!”
THE FAMILIARITY LOOP
In a sense, Arista and radio DJs faced a variation of the problem Andrew Pole was confronting at Target. Listeners are happy to sit through a song they might say they dislike, as long as it seems like something they’ve heard before. Pregnant women are happy to use coupons they receive in the mail, unless those coupons make it obvious that Target is spying into their wombs, which is unfamiliar and kind of creepy. Getting a coupon that makes it clear Target knows you’re pregnant is at odds from what a customer expects. It’s like telling a forty-two-year-old investment banker that he sang along to Celine Dion. It just feels wrong.
So how do DJs convince listeners to stick with songs such as “Hey Ya!” long enough for them to become familiar? How does Target convince pregnant women to use diaper coupons without creeping them out?
By dressing something new in old clothes, and making the unfamiliar seem familiar.
III.
In the early 1940s, the U.S. government began shipping much of the nation’s domestic meat supply to Europe and the Pacific theater to support troops fighting in World War II. Back home, the availability of steaks and pork chops began to dwindle. By the time the United States entered the war in late 1941, New York restaurants were using horse meat for hamburgers and a black market for poultry had emerged. [213] Federal officials became worried that a lengthy war effort would leave the nation starved of protein. This “problem will loom larger and larger in the United States as the war goes on,” former president Herbert Hoover wrote to Americans in a government pamphlet in 1943. “Our farms are short of labor to care for livestock; and on top of it all we must furnish supplies to the British and Russians. Meats and fats are just as much munitions in this war as are tanks and aeroplanes.”
Concerned, the Department of Defense approached dozens of the nation’s leading sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists-including Margaret Mead and Kurt Lewin, who would go on to become celebrity academics-and gave them an assignment: Figure out how to convince Americans to eat organ meats. Get housewives to serve their husbands and children the protein-rich livers, hearts, kidneys, brains, stomachs, and intestines that were left behind after the rib eyes and roast beef went overseas.
At the time, organ meat wasn’t popular in America. A middle-class woman in 1940 would sooner starve than despoil her table with tongue or tripe. So when the scientists recruited into the Committee on Food Habits met for the first time in 1941, they set themselves a goal of systematically identifying the cultural barriers that discouraged Americans from eating organ meat. In all, more than two hundred studies were eventually published, and at their core, they all contained a similar finding: To change people’s diets, the exotic must be made familiar. And to do that, you must camouflage it in everyday garb. [214]
To convince Americans to eat livers and kidneys, housewives had to know how to make the foods look, taste, and smell as similar as possible to what their families
The secret to changing the American diet, the Committee on Food Habits concluded, was familiarity. Soon, housewives were receiving mailers from the government telling them “every husband will cheer for steak and kidney pie.” [216] Butchers started handing out recipes that explained how to slip liver into meatloaf.
A few years after World War II ended, the Committee on Food Habits was dissolved. By then, however, organ meats had been fully integrated into the American diet. One study indicated that offal consumption rose by 33 percent during the war. By 1955, it was up 50 percent. [217] Kidney had become a staple at dinner. Liver was for special occasions. America’s dining patterns had shifted to such a degree that organ meats had become emblems of comfort.
Since then, the U.S. government has launched dozens of other efforts to improve our diets. For example, there was the “Five a Day” campaign, intended to encourage people to eat five fruits or vegetables, the USDA’s food pyramid, and a push for low-fat cheeses and milks. None of them adhered to the committee’s findings. None tried to camouflage their recommendations in existing habits, and as a result, all of the campaigns failed. To date, the only government program ever to cause a lasting change in the American diet was the organ meat push of the 1940s.
However, radio stations and massive companies-including Target-are a bit savvier.
To make “Hey Ya!” a hit, DJs soon realized, they needed to make the song feel familiar. And to do that, something special was required.
The problem was that computer programs such as Hit Song Science were pretty good at predicting people’s habits. But sometimes, those algorithms found habits that hadn’t actually emerged yet, and when companies market to habits we haven’t adopted or, even worse, are unwilling to admit to ourselves-like our secret affection for sappy ballads-firms risk going out of business. If a grocery store boasts “We have a huge selection of sugary cereals and ice cream!” shoppers stay away. If a butcher says “Here’s a piece of intestine for your dinner table,” a 1940s housewife serves tuna casserole instead. When a radio station boasts “Celine Dion every half hour!” no one tunes in. So instead, supermarket owners tout their apples and tomatoes (while making sure you pass the M &M’s and Haagen-Dazs on the way to the register), butchers in the 1940s call liver “the new steak,” and DJs quietly slip in the theme song from
“Hey Ya!” needed to become part of an established listening habit to become a hit. And to become part of a habit, it had to be slightly camouflaged at first, the same way housewives camouflaged kidney by slipping it into meatloaf. So at WIOQ in Philadelphia-as well as at other stations around the nation-DJs started making sure that whenever “Hey Ya!” was played, it was sandwiched between songs that were already popular. “It’s textbook playlist theory now,” said Tom Webster, a radio consultant. “Play a new song between two consensus popular hits.”
