In chapter seven of Duhigg’s 2014 book, The Power of Habit, he writes about measures taken to ensure the success of the 2003 song “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. (Crikey has it been so long? I remember performing that one…)
Music companies had long been using algorithms to predict the success of songs and albums. It was applied not only to production decisions, but also used by DJs and radio stations, which in turn would also generate a lot of the data used to create the algorithms. (For which reason, like the Internet itself, has become a regurgitative ouroboros.)
When “Hey Ya!” came along, it scored higher than nearly any song ever had in the algorithms and was expected to be a huge success. However, upon release it was a radio flop. When this song came on, most people would change the station. This generated an investigative rabbit hole as to why. Had the algorithm failed?
Long story short, what they found was little surprise: Humans are creatures of habit, and we are comfortable with what we already know.
They found that people were less likely to change the station if the song fit a pattern that they were comfortable with, that fit their internal habit/conditioned model of what makes good music. What is interesting about this is that many populations wouldn’t change the station even if on statistical average they didn’t like a song (e.g., men listening to Celine Dion), as long as it fit their internalized model of what good music is supposed to sound like. “Hey Ya!” however was just a little too different at the time to fit the common habit/conditioned model.
So “Hey Ya!” was approached in a different way. DJs began to sandwich it in between songs that were already very successful, songs that fit popular habit/conditioned models, songs that people were least likely to change on the radio. Many radio stations would even sandwich it between another, well-established popular song played twice.
In this way, they effectively programmed people to associate “Hey Ya!” with conditioned models they already had of what makes good music. The song eventually charted #1 in several countries and became ranked as one of the top hits of the 2000s.