What explains Jamiroquai? How can an artist be talented enough to have a big hit but not be talented enough to stay on the map? You can tell stories about market structure, contracts, fads, etc, but there is a statistical property that comes into play before all of that.
Suppose that only the top .0001% of all output gets our attention. These are the hits. And suppose that artists are ordered by their talent, call it τ. Talent measures the average quality of an artist’s output, but the quality of an individual piece is a draw from some distribution with mean τ.
Suppose that talent itself has a normal distribution within the population of artists. Let’s consider the talent level τ which is at the top .001 percentile. That is, only .001% of the population are more talented than τ. A striking property of the normal distribution is the following. Among all people who are more talented than τ, a huge percentage of them are just barely more talented than τ. Only a very small percentage, say 1% of the top .001% are significantly more talented than τ, they are the superstars. (See the footnote below for a precise statement of this fact.)
These superstars will consistently produce output in the top .0001%. They will have many hits. But they make up only 1% of the top .001% and so they make up only .00001% of the population. They can therefore contribute at most 10% of the hits.
The remaining 90% of the hits will be produced by artists who are not much more talented than τ. The most talented of these consist of the remaining 99% of the top .001%, i.e. close to .001% of the population. With all of these artists who are almost equal in terms of talent competing to perform in the top .0001%, each of these has at most a 1 in 10 chance of doing it once. A 1 in 100 chance of doing it twice, etc.
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(*A more precise version of this statement is something like the following. For any e>0 as small as you wish and y<100% as large as you wish, if you pick x big enough and you ask what is the conditional probability that someone more talented than x is not more talented than x+e, you can make that probability larger than y. This feature of the normal distribution is referred to as a thin tail property.)
Cheap Talk 
12 comments
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April 20, 2010 at 4:19 am
Filip Spagnoli
I don’t think you should assume that talent is correlated with “hits”. I’m sure you’ve heard of the hits of a certain Britney Spears, to name but one. As I’m sure you haven’t heard the non-hits of numerous talents.
April 20, 2010 at 6:04 am
Agent Continuum
Jamiroquai has a bunch of other awesome stuff. He’s big(-ish?) in the UK and the EU dance scene. Just saying. Just saying 🙂
April 20, 2010 at 8:17 am
Matt
Replace T for talent with M for marketability by big studio.
April 20, 2010 at 8:17 am
Alextatic
Interesting stuff…there is a tremendous amount of ommitted variable bias in the analysis though…I don’t think one hit wonders have to do that much with talent.
There are plenty of amazing artists with tremendous amount of talent without any major hits…especially in this day in age when the variance of talent is so much greater due to the reduced risk aggregating function that record labels provided in their heyday.
April 20, 2010 at 10:23 am
John
This blog has everything that I love. Game theory, The Bad Plus, technological fetishism, and now Jamiroquai! Not a topical comment, but it had to be made.
April 20, 2010 at 11:04 am
Alicia
I agree with Matt that T(tallent ) needs to be replaced by M ( marketability)
Now M=T^2*S(sex apeal) *1/4W(who you know)* P(publicity generation)
April 20, 2010 at 11:08 am
jeff
You forgot to raise it to the power H (hat size.)
April 20, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Donald A. Coffin
Another case in which more than half the occurrences (in this case, the quality of hit music) are below average (the arithmetic mean)–because the median is, in this case, significantly lower than the mean.
April 20, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Evan
I would agree that the function is more likely some version (of τ^a) x (M^b), with M standing for the marketing support provided by the label and b likely much higher than a (hello, Ke$ha!).
I would think that there is some element of risk aversion on the part of a&r men, possibly related to James March’s Hot Stove effect. If we assume that the talent level of each artist is unknown but that each subsequent release provides new information to the label, which sees the distribution of releases’ success as something of a two-armed bandit problem. Unfortunately, labels know that there is a tendency for many artists to only exceed that hurdle once, so a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy takes place as the labels “learn too quickly” – that is, the first time an artist produces a release that fails to meet the adequate hurdle, the label’s inherent risk aversion makes it more likely to fall into pattern recognition mode and assign too much value to this new negative information, like the cat who will never again jump on a hot stove, but neither a cold one for that matter. Put differently, the instant an artist produces something that fails to meet the hurdle – and one might argue that second releases are subject to a higher hurdle (ie increased expectations) – set by the label, the label cuts its marketing efforts to avoid throwing good money after bad – ie, it reduces M sharply, slashing the probability that a subsequent release meets the hurdle rate.
But then, what do I know?
April 20, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Donald A. Coffin
Could we call this the “Hootie Phenomenon,” in honor of Hootie and the Blowfish, whose second album (which “only” sold 4 million copies or so) was deemed a failure?
April 20, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Tom Loverro
I agree that Jamiroquai might not be the best example for a one hit wonder. Classic rock has better examples. Jamiroquai has six platinum albums in the UK…hardly a blip. The outlier was that one of those albums also appealed to American tastes.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamiroquai_discography
-Tom
April 20, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Ryan
I have always felt that the wonder of the one-hit wonders was not that they couldn’t make another hit but that they became well-known off of just one hit. One important part of art is the ability to develop an intriguing theme and reapply it in different ways to create a context. Once admirers/fans grasp the context, each additional piece of artwork is like another event in the sequence which tells kind of a story (often making connections through the use of the same characters/patterns or otherwise making references.) This blog also seems to make use of that technique by reapplying a basic way of thinking to different topics. When all wrapped up it is a like a mosaic with common threads running through a variety of patterns and colors. This is an important way art gives meaning.
As an interesting comparison, I don’t know if there are many painters whose talent is recognized in just one painting. That’s not because it’s impossible to draw one talented painting, but rather that in just one painting it’s difficult to understand the artist and discern the meaning. One way to sort of allow viewers to catch on more quickly, however, is by using common symbols people are already familiar with.
I think one-hit wonders really are incredible because they are able to in just one short song make a connection with a huge group of people. This is like most YouTube videos. It’s easy to dismiss these things as silly pop culture, but I think there is usually something unique in them that somehow means something to a lot of people. Usually, however, I can’t figure out what that is.