What’s the News: It’s always a gamble when a record company decides to sign a new band, as they can never truly predict which artists will be successful. Sometimes marketing firms will use focus groups
to guess at future musical gold mines, but conflicting motivations, among other things, can hamper results
. Now, researchers have found that while you may not be able to consciously pinpoint which songs will be hits, your brain just might. How the Heck:
In a study conducted in 2006, Emory neuroeconomist Gregory Berns and his team had teenagers listen to 15-second clips of 120 obscure songs from unsigned artists on Myspace. The researchers recorded participants’ neural reactions using fMRI, and the teenagers rated their preferences for each song on a scale of one to five.
Three years later, while watching American Idol with his children, Berns realized that one of the songs in his study ...
