Ongoing History Daily: How to predict hits using teenage girls
Predicting if a song is going to be a hit is a fool’s business because you never, ever know what the public might go for. But that hasn’t stopped record labels from gathering data on the popularity of a certain song.
As far as we can tell, the first time there was any market research on the viability of a song was in 1959 when a couple of American promoters sent out a questionnaire to 3,000 girls about their musical tastes and preferences in hopes of gathering enough data to write the perfect pop song that would soar up the charts. It didn’t work.
But then there was Bernie Lowe who ran a label called Cameo Parkway back in the early 60s. He played test records for his teenage daughter and between 1961 and 1973 she correctly predicted seventeen top 10 hits, including three number-one records.