Brain scans help predict hit songs

Brain scans of teenagers listening to music may be able to predict whether a song is going to be a commercial hit or a flop, scientists claim.

Researchers at Emory University, Atlanta, US stumbled upon the discovery while studying how peer pressure affects teenagers. The scientists used music to find out how teenagers were influenced by the opinions of their peers.

In the study, which started in 2006, 27 teenagers aged between 12 and 17 listened to music clips from 120 unknown songs selected from MySpace, for an hour. During this time, their brain activity was monitored using functional magnetic resolution imaging (fMRI).

The subjects were also asked to rate how much they liked each song on a scale of one to five.

Three years later, three of the songs had become a commercial success, with more than 500,000 unit sales, the music industry's definition of a hit. This gave the researchers an opportunity to compare the brain scan data taken while listening to the songs before they became hits, and compare it with those from the other songs, all flops.

"When we plotted the data on a graph, we found a "sweet spot" for sales of 20,000 units," said neuroeconomist Dr. Gregory Berns.

"The brain responses could predict about one-third of the songs that would eventually go on to sell more than 20,000 units."

Previous studies have also shown that a response in the brain's reward centres can predict people's individual choices – but only in those people actually receiving brain scans.

When it came to flops, the data was even clearer: About 90 per cent of the songs that drew a mostly weak response from the neural reward centre of the teens went on to sell fewer than 20,000 units.

Although the teenagers brain scans could help predict a chart hit, there was no correlation between how they rated the song on a scale of one to five, and future sales.

"You have to stop and think, and your thoughts may be coloured by whatever biases you have, and how you feel about revealing your preferences to a researcher," Dr. Berns said.

But "you really can't fake the brain responses while you're listening to the song," he added.

The study is published online in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

This article was published on Mon 13 June 2011