SOCI 1101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3.4: Justin Timberlake
1 Nov 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Profits of cultural industries depend disproportionately on the occasional outsize success to offset the many investments that fail blockbuster movie, best-selling book, etc. Reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know (for entertainment, business, and politics as well) Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of millions of individuals. For failed projects it shows that experts are either not studying their own success carefully enough or they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audiences. People almost never make decisions independently, we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own. Partially because we never know what we want. And what we often want is not so much to experience the best but the same things that others are experiencing. Life without one another to rely on would be intolerable and meaningless.
