How weasels go pop

Ever wondered how and why you found yourself listening to Michael Bolton?s Can I Touch You... There?

Ever wondered how and why you found yourself listening to Michael Bolton’s Can I Touch You... There? at any single point of your life? Apart from being genetically inclined towards bad taste, you were listening to the golden-maned swoon-monster because other people were listening to him. It sounds obvious — and provides you an excuse — but a study published in Science points out what the inventor of bestseller lists always knew: people will select something if they think others have selected it.

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The research was based on a survey trying to crack that age-old question: what makes a song a hit? Till now, no one really understood how Engelbert Humperdinck’s Release Me was No. 1 on the 1967 charts and the Beatles’s Strawberry Fields Forever was No. 2. With the study pointing to humanity’s innate herd instinct, we can now guess that Humperdinck’s record company may have had better PR tactics. The study also explains why more success runs after the successful. Cross your heart and tell us that you picked up that Dan Brown book because the blurb alone interested you. You can’t, can you, for it was the buzz that got you interested.

While this ‘everybody-likes-it-so-I-should-like-it-too’ formula works for most things, it still fails to explain one thing: why did even one person in the world like Michael Bolton? The mystery just got deepened.