So yeah, I’ve basically become an addict to Malcolm Gladwell books; and blink is the last one that I’ve finished. While Tipping Point and Outliers are about the world around us, blink is more about how we think and the choices that seem to be made in an instant. Check out the abridged excerpt below about one of my favorite artists, Kenna, and consider purchasing the book on Amazon.
Malcolm Gladwell, blink
”…people who truly know music (the kind of people who run record labels, go to clubs, and know the business well) love Kenna. They hear one of his songs, and, in the blink of an eye, they think, Wow! More precisely, they hear Kenna and their instinct is that he is the kind of artist whom other people – the mass audience of music buyers – are going to like. But this is where Kenna runs into a problem, because whenever attempts have been made to verify this instinct that other people are going to like him, other people haven’t liked him.
When Kenna’s album was making the rounds in New York, being considered by music industry executives, on three separate occasions it was given to an outside market research firm. This is common practice in the industry. In order to be successful, an artist has to get played on the radio. So, before they commit millions of dollars signing an artist, record companies will spend a few thousand dollars to test his or her music first, using the same techniques as the radio stations.
There are firms, for example, that post new songs on the Web and then collect and analyze the ratings of anyone who visits the Website and listens to the music. Other companies play songs over the phone or send sample CDs to a stable of raters. Hundreds of music listeners end up voting on particular songs, and over the years the rating systems have become extraordinarily sophisticated.
These are the kinds of services that Kenna’s record was given to — and the results were dismal. Music Research, a California-based firm, sent Kenna’s CD to twelve hundred people. The response was, as the conclusion to the twenty-five page “Kenna” report stated politely, “subdued.” Pick the Hits rated every song on the album, with two scoring average ratings and eight scoring below average. The conclusion was even more blunt this time: “Kenna, as an artist, and his songs lack a core audience and have limited potential to gain significant radio airplay.”
Kenna once ran into Paul McGuiness, the manager of U2 , backstage at a concert. “This man right here,” McGuiness said, pointing to Kenna, “he’s going to change the world.” That was his instinctive feeling, and the manager of a band like U2 is a man who knows music. But the people whose world Kenna was supposed to be changing, it seemed, couldn’t disagree more, and when the results of the consumer research came in, Kenna’s once promising career suddenly stalled. To get on the radio, there had to be hard evidence that the public liked him — and the evidence just wasn’t there.
I really enjoyed blink; and the chapter on page Kenna was my favorite of all the Gladwell books I’ve read so far. It focused on the differences between the quick decision making and opinions of “experts” vs that of consumers – who typically don’t really know what they want. There are also an empathetically eye-opening chapter on the Amadou Diallo incident, and why the cops managed to shoot the man 41 times – no racism.
Have you read blink? What’d you think about it, Kenna’s Dillemma, or the Diallo case?
