{"id":1083,"date":"2012-10-22T06:56:20","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T01:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teekhapan.wordpress.com\/?p=1083"},"modified":"2012-10-22T06:56:20","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T01:26:20","slug":"why-the-world-is-going-gaga-over-gangnam-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/2012\/10\/22\/why-the-world-is-going-gaga-over-gangnam-style\/","title":{"rendered":"Why\u2019s the world going gaga over Gangnam Style?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nVivek Kaul
\nThis year\u2019s top video on YouTube has been Gangnam Style<\/i>, a South Korean song which has taken the world by storm. And as happens with anything that becomes successful people have started to look for reasons behind its success. The song has been labeled the crossover from the East to the West something that took actor Jackie Chan three decades to achieve.
\nOne article looking into the success of the song pointed out “Yet, its rise to universality is no fluke. Its success occurs when the world is shifting in radical ways, at a time when individuals, empowered by the information technology, can change world history”.
\nThe problem with this argument is that the same information technology was available to other songs and artists. Take the case of the home grown Kolaveri<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>Di<\/i>\u00a0which took India by storm early this year. Like Gangnam Style <\/i>the song had been put up on YouTube and it was trending within days of its upload.\u00a0 But its popularity never spread beyond India and Indians. How do you explain that? If information technology was the only criteria then Kolaveri Di <\/i>should have been as big a hit as Gangnam Style<\/i>, perhaps even bigger given that a sufficient number of Indians live in all corners of the globe.
\nSo what is happening here? As Paul Ormerod explains in his new book Positive Linking \u2013 How Networks Can Revolutionise the World <\/i>\u201cAs usual, we could in principle always tell a story after the event which purports to the account for the much further greater popularity of one video compared to another.\u201d What this basically means is that it is easy to rationalise success by spinning a story around it once it has happened. But that doesn\u2019t mean that those were the reasons for the success.\u00a0Like the success of Kolaveri Di<\/i> was attributed to its KISS (keep it simple stupid) strategy.
\nBut the point is if identifying success was so easy we would all be doing it. Michael Mauboussin has a very interesting example in his soon to be released book The Success Equation \u2013 Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports and Investing. <\/i>Llyod Braun, Chairman of ABC Entertainment Group had proposed a show called Lost. <\/i>It was a cross between Cast Away, <\/i>a movie that featured Tom Hanks stranded on a desert island, and Survivor, <\/i>a reality TV show about contestants who compete with one another in the wilderness and then vote to remove members\u00a0 until only one person is left. \u201cMichael Eisner, the CEO of Disney\u2026heard the pitch and rated Loss <\/i>a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the worst\u2026Eisner later called the show \u201cterrible\u201d\u2026Despite Eisner\u2019s dim view of the show Lost <\/i>was a smash success\u2026Lost <\/i>ran for six reasons and improved ABC\u2019s slumping ratings and profits,\u201d writes Mauboussin. The irony was that Braun who had proposed the show had already been fired by then.
\nSo the history of cultural markets is full of such examples which were written off. As\u00a0 Duncan J Watts writes in Everything is Obvious \u2013 Once You Know the Answer <\/i>\u201cThe history of cultural markets is crowded with examples of future blockbusters \u2013 Elvis, Star Wars, Seinfeld . Harry Potter, American Idol \u2013 that publishers and movie studios left for read while simultaneously betting big on total failures.\u201d
\nAnother great example is Slumdog Millionaire<\/i> which almost did not release and went to DVD straight away. The film went onto to win eight Oscar awards. The Hangover<\/i> was another such hit. Made at a low budget of $35million, the movie went onto earn close to $468million. \u00a0Closer to home critics wrote of Sholay <\/i>as dead ember and Hum Aapke Hain Koun<\/i> as an extended wedding video. We all know what happened there. And since then scores of Hindi movies which are versions of these two movies have been made.
\nJK Rowling\u2019s Harry Potter and the Philosopher\u2019s Stone<\/i> was rejected by 12 publishers till Bloomsbury agreed to publish it. \u00a0The first print run of the book was 1000 copies. Once the book was a super-hit it was deemed as a phenomenon waiting to happen. \u00a0\u00a0Michael Maouboussin explains this tendency in a research paper titled\u00a0Was Harry Potter Inevitable?\u00a0<\/i>\u201cOur society often associates success with quality. In a fiercely competitive market, the thinking goes, only the best products rise to the surface. Once a product is a hit, whether a blockbuster movie or a bestselling book, we readily point to the attributes that make it so appealing,\u201d he writes.
\nMaouboussin gives a more detailed explanation for the phenomenon in his new book. \u201cIf you are like me, you have a hard time accepting that there isn\u2019t just a little special about The Da Vinci Code, Titanic, or the Mona Lisa. <\/i>The very fact that they are so wildly popular seems to be all the evidence you need to conclude that they have some special qualities that makes them stand above all the rest. But all three were surprises. Our minds are expert at wiping out surprises and creating order, and order dictates that these products are special.\u201d
\nHence, the reasons highlighted have nothing to do with the success, typically. People like the product (be it a book, a song or a movie) initially and once the product becomes slightly popular they tend to become more popular because they are popular. This is referred to as the Matthew Effect after a verse in the Gospel of Matthew \u201cFor whosever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance.\u201d
\nBut that clearly doesn\u2019t stop people from coming up with more and more explanations for success. As Watt puts it \u201cIn the end, the only honest explanation may be the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss\u2019s surprise bestseller,\u00a0Eats, Shoots and Leaves,<\/i>\u00a0who, when asked to explain its success, replied that \u201cit sold because lots of people bought it.\u201d Similarly\u00a0Gangnam Style <\/i>worked because a lot of people heard it. Its success was a total \u2018fluke\u2019.
\nThe article originally appeared in the Daily News and Analysis dated October 22, 2012.\u00a0http:\/\/www.dnaindia.com\/money\/report_whys-the-world-going-gaga-over-gangnam-style_1754813<\/a>
\n(Vivek Kaul is a writer and he can be reached at vivek.kaul@gmail.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vivek Kaul This year\u2019s top video on YouTube has been Gangnam Style, a South Korean song which has taken the world by storm. And as happens with anything that becomes successful people have started to look for reasons behind its success. The song has been labeled the crossover from the East to the West something … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,14,23],"tags":[1051,1073,1169,1383,1524,1627,1911,2245,2289,2341,2687,2783,3283,3344,3383,3452,3657,3684,3740,3776],"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"Vivek Kaul","author_link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/author\/vivekkaul\/"},"qubely_comment":0,"qubely_category":"Analysis<\/a> Business<\/a> Daily News and Analysis<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"Vivek Kaul This year\u2019s top video on YouTube has been Gangnam Style, a South Korean song which has taken the world by storm. And as happens with anything that becomes successful people have started to look for reasons behind its success. The song has been labeled the crossover from the East to the West something…","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}