“Fitting In While Standing Out”: The Sonic-Semantic Structure of Innovation and Success in Popular Music"
Abstract: The aphorism, “nobody knows anything,” captures the inherent uncertainty in cultural markets arising from fickle and unpredictable tastes. Producers respond to this volatility through overproduction and relentless innovation, while consumers, overwhelmed by this deluge of products, rely on cognitive shortcuts to navigate the chaos. This uncertainty is further compounded by the creative tension between novelty and familiarity i.e., products that are too conventional or too innovative often fail, making prediction of success notoriously difficult. Market categories emerge as critical remedies in this situation, providing templates for producers while transforming these overwhelming options into manageable choices for consumers. By activating schemas that signal a product’s qualities, categories help resolve the novelty-familiarity calculus and satisfy the “categorical imperative,” which suggests that genre-typical products outperform atypical ones due to the “illegitimacy discount” faced by products defying classification. We explore how this sensemaking operates in popular music, where success is even more difficult to predict. Unlike existing research focusing solely on a song’s sonic features, we analyze how both sound (sonic typicality) and lyrics (semantic typicality) interact to shape evaluations and popularity, using a dataset of over 5 million English-language songs. We find that sonic typicality follows an inverted U-shaped curve, where songs occupying a “sweet spot” between novelty and familiarity are most successful. In contrast, semantic typicality follows a U-shaped curve, where lyrics that are either conventional or novel perform best. Our most important finding, however, is the interaction between these dimensions. Sound and lyrics serve as complementary familiarity anchors that afford innovation in one dimension while balancing convention in the other, and make songs popular by resolving the novelty-familiarity paradox while satisfying the categorical imperative. This “anchoring effect” is even more pronounced for genre-blending songs, which rely on such complementary anchoring to resolve their categorical ambiguity and legitimize their boundary-spanning nature by fitting in through one dimension while standing out in the other. These findings allow us to propose potential success strategies for popular music and cultural markets at large.
Bio: Abdul is a PhD candidate in the dual-title Sociology and Social Data Analytics program at Penn State. He specializes in putting together new ‘big’ datasets and applying advanced computational methods combined with social theoretical rigor to study cultural dynamics and collective behavior.
