What is Hit Makers About?
Hit Makers is the story of how anything becomes popular. The obvious answer is that we don’t fully know. If we did know, then we would be back in the age of corporate-determined popularity, akin to when the Top 40 was decided by recording companies instead of compiled via aggregating various methods of listening to music. However, we can look at what has become popular, despite industry-wide gatekeeping and also with industry-backed support, to see what traits are common.
This book, originally published in 2017, goes through the history of mass media in the US and the rise of the advertising industry. It traces the advent of the consumer monoculture into the incredibly fractured and algorithmically enforced cultural segmentation that we now know. Through this historic recount, two questions are intertwined: “how do we get people to buy what we’re selling?” and “how do we make our product the product that people are talking about?”
It would be a disservice to the book to distill the answers into one paragraph, but I’ll do it anyways. People like new things that can be situated into their already lived experiences; there are gradations in the spectrum of how novel an experience can be, but the general point is that every person has a capacity to tolerate discomfort with something new. Popularity is being able to widely hit that mark, right on the edge of discomfort, so that a broad audience both enjoys the novelty but can place it within their understanding of the known and cliche.
Who is Derek Thompson?
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic. As of this moment, he is more (in)famously known as the co-author if the book Abundance, with Ezra Klein. However, his day job is as a journalist and podcast host. As an author, he writes about and forecasts contemporary trends in technology and science in relation to society and the workforce to both warn and celebrate about what is appearing on the horizon.
But Is Hit Makers Good?
As a read, it’s quick, breezy, and understandable. It’s also a popular science books, at the intersection of popular psychology, sociology, and advertising. It’s a fun read. The benefit of reading books by journalists is that, by training and vocation, these authors must know how to keep a reader engaged, and that is reflected in the writing.
The book itself will help put words (and citations) to what you probably already had an intuition about, but it is nice to know that experiments have both confirmed and complicated such theories. This book is great for people who have a goal to read more because it offers three useful things:
- Popular cultural references
- Arguments that must be worked through to exercise logical reasoning and critical thinking
- An engaging style
In a one-sentence answer to my own question: yes, the book is good. Also, if you start the book and decide it’s not for you, there’s no shame in stopping.
Other Views on Hit Makers
Maybe you’re curious but want a wider view of online thoughts of the book. In the spirit of that, here are other people’s writing (with various paywalls) on Hit Makers:
- The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/22/hit-makers-by-derek-thompson-review
- Vox: https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/2/16/14559854/hit-makers-derek-thompson-review
- USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2017/02/05/hit-makers-the-science-of-popularity-in-an-age-of-distraction-book-review/97061624/
- Big Think: https://bigthink.com/high-culture/derek-thompson-the-science-of-music-why-your-brain-gets-hooked-on-hit-songs/
- Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/2295a826-eede-11e6-ba01-119a44939bb6