For middle-level performers, luck is of relatively little consequence, as good and bad luck tend to average out. Yet a streak of good luck—along with prodigious talent and effort—is essential for someone to reach the top of the ladder and achieve superstar status. Think of it this way: you could be a supremely talented poker player, but you also need luck to draw a straight flush. There are, by contrast, any number of ways that you could draw a mediocre hand. It is the combination of luck and skill that leads to greatness.
The role of luck is easy to identify in sports competitions—the ball bouncing the right way at the right time, a referee making a bad call, a key player getting injured at an inopportune time. The economist Robert Frank points out in his book Success and Luck that track athletes had a tailwind propelling them in seven of the eight events in which the current world record was set in the men’s and women’s 100 meter dash, high hurdles, long jump, and triple jump.3 The wind was certainly beyond their control but in their favor. (There have also been unlucky sprinters who had their world records invalidated because the wind was too strong; sometimes too much good luck can be a bad thing.)
In music, talent and effort surely matter—as in sports—but they are harder to assess. And the challenge of spotting talent is made all the more difficult by the way that tastes change and popularity spreads, as discussed in Chapter 4.4 The market for books, movies, and television programs presents a similar environment. Luck looms large in the creative arts.
One of my favorite examples of luck in the arts involves J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. Her literary agent, Christopher Little, sold the U.K. rights to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to Bloomsbury for just £2,500, and then waited two years for the book to become popular by word of mouth before auctioning the U.S. rights to Scholastic. The book took off after that point.5 How did the thirty-two-year-old Rowling select Mr. Little as her literary agent in 1995? After being rejected by the first agent she sent her manuscript to, she searched for another in The Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book at her public library in Edinburgh. She latched onto Christopher Little because his name sounded like a character from her children’s book. Little (who was dismissed by Rowling in 2011) was surely one of the luckiest men in the world. His commission for the Harry Potter book series has totaled in the tens of millions of dollars.
There are many indications that luck plays a pervasive role in the music industry as well. Even experts in record labels’ artists and repertoire (A&R) divisions, with much at stake and years of experience, have difficulty picking winners. Columbia Records turned down Elvis Presley in 1955. Decca famously rejected the Beatles when they auditioned in London on New Year’s Day, 1962. And Capitol Records in the United States initially passed on the Beatles in 1963.6 Legendary talent scout John Hammond described the opposition he faced over signing Bob Dylan in 1961: “I brought in Dylan and signed him, and this was over everybody’s dead body. One vice president at Columbia was annoyed at me because I had let Joan Baez go to Vanguard.”7
After EMI passed on releasing their album in the United States, the Swedish rock band Roxette broke through because an American high school exchange student in Sweden happened to take their record home with him to Minneapolis and pestered local radio stations to play their song “The Look.”8
Entertainment lawyer John Eastman told me that he once congratulated David Geffen, whom he considers one of the smartest people in the business, for signing Kurt Cobain and Nirvana to his eponymous record label.9 Geffen replied that he was as surprised as Eastman by Nirvana’s success. Eastman recalled Geffen saying, “John, I admit we didn’t know we had them. It came over the transom. We put it out, barely, and boom!”
Or consider Sixto Rodriguez, the subject of the Academy Award–winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man. Rodriguez recorded two albums between 1970 and 1975 that were commercial flops in the United States, and he was in the middle of recording a third when he was dropped by his record label. But he was a huge success in South Africa, where his music became the anthem of the anti-apartheid movement. Amazingly, for decades he was unaware of his fame and influence. Instead of making music, he spent the rest of his career doing construction and production-line work in Detroit—until the Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul discovered his story (another instance of luck), which resuscitated his career.
Steve Rowland, who produced Sixto Rodriguez’s second album, Coming from Reality, in 1971, said, “I’ve produced a lot of big-name artists with big hits, like Peter Frampton and Jerry Lee Lewis, but I’ve never worked with anyone as talented as Rodriguez.” He added, “I never understood why he didn’t become a big star, so to see him rise like a phoenix from the ashes, it’s just as inexplicable, but it makes me really, really happy.”10
Despite their significant investment in A&R and promotion efforts, major record labels do well if one in ten of their records ends up covering its costs.
Have you ever heard of Carly Hennessy? Chances are you haven’t. Hennessy, an Irish singer and actress, was signed to a big contract in 2001 by MCA when she was just eighteen years old. She recognized her good fortune: “Some people just struggle,” she said. “I was very, very lucky.” Evidently, though, Hennessy wasn’t lucky enough. Despite the label investing $2.2 million to produce and promote her debut album, Ultimate High, the record turned out to be a commercial flop.11 Ultimate High sold only 328 copies in the first three months following its release, and MCA dropped her the next year. Hennessy’s record could have bombed for any number of reasons. Her album came out shortly after 9/11, which cut into the nation’s appetite for upbeat songs. Record stations didn’t pick up her songs, and retail stores were reluctant to stock her album.
Suppose a band is both good and lucky enough to release a song that does become a hit. Is it likely to do so again? Possibly, but the odds are against it. Of the 2,591 artists who recorded a Top 100 song since 1960, only 40 percent managed to do it more than once.12 The odds of repeating for a Top 10 song are even longer—only 22 percent of the 490 bands who produced a Top 10 song from 1960 to 2017 managed to do it again.
Figure 5.1 shows the number of times that each of the artists who ever had a song reach the Billboard Year-End Top 100 made the list from 1960 to 2017. Selection for the Billboard Top 100 is based on a complex weighting of physical and digital sales, airplay, and streaming, so making it to the Top 100, out of the tens of thousands of songs released each year, is a mark of extraordinary success. Since a musician’s talent is unlikely to change much from year to year, and since making it onto the Billboard charts should give an artist’s future songs increased attention, the fact that having a repeat hit is so uncommon underscores the importance of luck.
“There’s plenty of room at the bottom; there’s only so much room at the top,” said bassist Rudy Sarzo, who played with Ozzy Osbourne and Quiet Riot. He succinctly captured the message of Figure 5.1 with his observation: “Getting to the top is hard. Staying at the top is virtually impossible.”13
Figure 5.1: Number of Appearances on Billboard Year-End Top 100, 1960–2017
Source: Author’s calculations using data from Billboard’s Year-End Top 100.
The extremely skewed distribution of hit songs, even among the most talented and successful in the music business, is consistent with a power law, with popularity spreading through cascades of networked individuals. A tiny fraction of extremely lucky and talented phenoms—Rihanna, Madonna, Drake, the Beatles, Mariah Carey, Elton John, Michael Jackson—made the list multiple times. But was even their success guaranteed?
The role of luck in determining a song’s popularity was demonstrated in another clever experiment conducted by the sociologists Matt Salganik and Duncan Watts.14 As in their other experiments, the researchers posted forty-eight songs in an online music library, with the musicians’ permission. Listeners were invited to log in to the library
and sample the songs, with the opportunity to download the songs for free. Participants were shown the list of songs, ranked by the number of times each one had been downloaded up to that point. They could also see the exact download counts, so they were aware of the popularity of each song, based on the collective wisdom of other participants. From there, the subjects could click on a song to play it, and then were given the option to download the song.
For the first 750 participants, the researchers faithfully tallied and displayed the number of downloads for each song. But here’s the twist: the subsequent 6,000 participants were randomly—and unknowingly—assigned to one of two alternative scenarios. In one scenario, they continued to see the true download counts. In the other scenario, the researchers surreptitiously flipped the initial download counts, so that the forty-eighth-most-popular song was listed as the most popular song, the forty-seventh song was listed as number two, and so on. After this inversion in the ranking, the researchers let the download tallies grow on their own.
Did the cream rise to the top? Or did the artificial boost in the ranking cause the worst song (based on the original, accurate download count) to become popular?
In the scenario where the download counts were presented accurately, at the end of the experiment the top song was “She Said” by Parker Theory, which had been downloaded more than five hundred times. The least popular song, “Florence,” by Post Break Tragedy, had been downloaded just twenty-nine times. So the natural outcome of the experiment was that the most popular song was nearly twenty times more popular than the least popular song.
In the alternative scenario, where the true rankings were reversed, Post Break Tragedy’s “Florence,” previously the least popular song, did surprisingly well; in fact, it held on to its artificially bestowed top ranking. (In full disclosure, I could barely stand to listen to it.) “She Said,” the most popular song in the first scenario, rose in the rankings, so fundamental quality did have some effect. But overall, across all forty-eight songs, the final ranking from the scenario that began with the reversed popularity ordering bore hardly any relationship to the final ranking from the experiment that began with the true ordering. The belief that a song is popular had a profound effect on its popularity, even if it wasn’t truly popular to start with.
Duncan Watts summarized the findings from his experiments as follows:
When people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors—a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.15
Cumulative advantage undoubtedly plays out in the actual market as well.
A musician can come out with the wrong song at the right time, or the right song at the wrong time. He or she can be too early to catch a wave, or too late to stay afloat. Superstars have to hit the right wave at the right time, in exactly the right way. Tony Bennett bombed at rock and roll. Kid Rock would probably fail at swing tunes if he’d been born in another era. Only a handful of performers, such as Paul Simon and the Beatles, have been able to excel in more than one genre, and across multiple decades.
As a top merchandiser once remarked to me, “A one-hit wonder is a miracle.” Past success is no guarantee of future success in the music business because chance factors—including timing, the national mood, initial reviews, and airplay—must all align to create a hit. This explains why less than 30 percent of the 706 bands that scored a number-one hit in the weekly Billboard charts from 1960 to 2017 managed to achieve the same feat again.
What is true for a song also holds for a musician’s career. Bruce Springsteen acknowledged the uncertainty inherent in a musician’s career when he wrote:
You never completely control the arc of your career. Events, historical and cultural, create an opportunity; a special song falls into your lap and a window for impact, communication, success, the expansion of your musical vision, opens. It may close as quickly, never to return. You don’t get to completely decide when it’s your time. You may have worked unwaveringly, honestly, all the while—consciously or unconsciously—positioning yourself, but you never really know if your “big” moment will come. Then, for the few, it’s there.16
Had he not auditioned before John Hammond at Columbia Records in New York City, who knows if Springsteen’s big moment ever would have arrived.
And that goes for the rest of the E Street Band as well. Max Weinberg, for example, has said he often wonders, “What if I hadn’t answered that ad?” As he put it:
What would have happened to my life had I not met Bruce and the E Street Band? What would have happened to the Beatles had they not gotten Ringo? What would have happened had they stuck with Pete Best? He was a very, very good drummer. But as I think as he himself has said, Ringo was a much better Beatle. Chemistry is everything.17
Chemistry adds another dimension in which chance can play a role. The band members’ sound may or may not strike a chord. The group may or may not get along. The band’s personality may or may not shine through, or may or may not be appealing. For any number of reasons, the chemistry might not be right.
The outsized role of luck in launching a musician’s career helps explain another anomaly that I mentioned in Chapter 3: why, compared to top business executives and athletes, did only a handful of top musicians have parents who were superstars in their profession? If all that mattered was talent, training, and connections, Frank Sinatra Jr. and Nancy Sinatra should have been enduring superstars.
Even the elder Sinatra, who never doubted his own prodigious talent, acknowledged a role for luck. Sinatra said, “People often remark that I’m pretty lucky. Luck is only important in so far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you’ve got to have talent and know how to use it.”18 From the standpoint of the music business as a whole, there are a great many talented people, but talent takes you only so far. In addition to talent, arbitrary factors can lead to success or failure, like whether another band happens to release a more popular song than yours at the same time.
The difference between a Sixto Rodriguez and a Bob Dylan, or even a Post Break Tragedy and Post Malone, depends much more on luck and timing than we commonly acknowledge. In hindsight, it is hard to imagine the world without Madonna or Dylan, but if the chips had fallen a slightly different way at a critical point in their careers, or in a rival’s career, we might well feel that it would be hard to imagine the world without some other superstar’s music. Just ask Sixto Rodriguez how easy it is for the flame of fame to be ignited or extinguished.
Making the Most of Luck
Becky Weinberg, Max’s better half, once asked me how I got my job at Princeton University. I explained that luck played a major role. I just happened to sit next to Ginna Ashenfelter, the wife of one of Princeton’s greatest economists, Orley Ashenfelter, on a flight to the American Economic Association Meeting, where I was interviewing for jobs. Perhaps thinking about Max’s audition forty years earlier, Becky responded by echoing Seneca: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take advantage of the opportunity that presented itself when Princeton called to invite me to interview for a job, which never would have happened
if I had had a different seat on that airplane.
Allen Klein, who managed Sam Cooke, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, started out as an accountant. His career in the music business advanced because he ran into an old classmate, music publisher Don Kirshner, on the street in New York. Kirshner offered to steer some clients Klein’s way to audit their record labels’ books. “It was really happenstance that I got into the music business,” Klein told his hometown newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger, in 2002. “I never wanted to be a manager. It was going over the books that I loved. And I was good at it.”19 Chutzpah also helped. When Klein met Bobby Darin at Kirshner’s wedding, he immediately promised to get the singer $100,000 if he hired Klein to audit his royalty payments.
Luck—factors beyond your control—affect where you are born, who your parents are, where you go to school, your health, and nearly every other aspect of life. As Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker and a dozen other bestsellers, told the graduating class of 2012 at Princeton University in his baccalaureate speech:
You are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.20
In other words, we are all better off if we recognize the role that luck plays in contributing to our successes, and if we are more tolerant and supportive of those who are less lucky.
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