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Requiem For A Monster Hit - Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know"
09-20-2012, 02:04 PM,
#1
Requiem For A Monster Hit - Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know"
Quote:...Though "Call Me Maybe" displaced "Somebody I Used To Know" at the top of the chart in early June, Gotye's song hung around all summer. But two weeks ago, for the first time since March, "Somebody" fell out of the top 10. It has been weeks since even a video that complains about the song's ubiquity has gone viral.

Earlier this summer, in the middle of its long chart run, Ann Powers floated a question in my direction: How did "Somebody" manage this success?

...

1. Because lots of people really like it.

...Making Mirrors had been out in Australia for six months by the time Universal Republic released it in January, and "Somebody" had already been exported successfully to Europe and — crucially — the Internet by the time the label picked it up. The video for the song — De Backer and Kimbra standing naked in a room, slowly covered in body paint so that they blend in with the pattern on the wall — had millions of views before it ever got played on the radio in the U.S.

"When something like that gets picked up and it's very catchy and very likable but it's also different, it's something special, and you can feel it right away when it comes on," says Dave Bakula, a Senior Vice President at Nielsen. He says that the company first registered sales for the song in mid-2011, around the same time that the video first appeared on YouTube.

Perhaps that slow build is a part of the song's long life. For fans who knew Gotye from his previous albums or Internet seekers who stumbled up on the video, there would have been plenty of time to develop a personal relationship with the song before it hit radio and — almost immediately — became inescapable.

2. Because Universal pushed it to the radio. Hard.

"All of a sudden the radio airplay really started to pick up around January. And once you got that, the sales really followed," Bakula says of the song's arrival on the mass-market scene. "You're always going to be able to see something grow a little bit from a grass-roots manner ... but when you're talking about massive hits and massive hits that drive massive sales like this, you really need that great radio exposure nationally and across formats."

Universal planned, from the beginning, to introduce "Somebody" to American audiences by landing it in rotation on two types of radio format: Alternative (basically anything that's "rock" but not "classic rock") and Adult Album Alternative (broadly known as AAA or "triple-A," it caters to people who don't have to borrow their parents' credit card to buy a song on iTunes). That's a typical plan for a song by a relative unknown, Tombrink says, but the response from radio stations was anything but typical. Where it usually takes around four months from the point of introduction to move a song into heavy rotation or "power" rotation, "Somebody" made the jump within "a couple of days in some circumstances," Tombrink says. "That just doesn't happen."

...

3. Because we're living in the age of Adele.

In a recent post on The Village Voice's Sound of the City blog, Chris Molanphy dubbed "Somebody" one of a trio of "snowball songs" ("We Are Young" and "Call Me Maybe" are the others), hits that gained momentum to the point that they became unstoppable forces once they reached the top of the charts. Molanphy cites plenty of history that suggests this kind of trend is unusual and probably cyclical, but it's easy to imagine that in the age of Adele it might be a new reality.

What if the universe of pop music is so splintered that the few songs and albums that manage to summit the chart remain there because there's nothing else to challenge them? While big pop albums of the late 1990s and early '00s — the industry's last golden era — regularly sold more than 10 million copies, Adele's 21 is the only album released in the last 10 years to approach that tally (Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below doesn't count because it's a double album). Think of it as the "cash-for-gold" theory of music sales: We've got so few reliable, genuine hits that the ones that rise to the top stay there.

4. Because "Somebody" sounds different from anything else on the radio.

"This is not your typical Top 40 record," says Tombrink. But despite that fact, or maybe because of it, "Somebody That I Used To Know" made an impression on audiences well beyond the markets where Universal first aimed it. Sounding different may have helped.

You can actually make this case of all three songs that occupied the No. 1 spot during that 23-week run: none sound anything like the thudding, dance-heavy tracks that have dominated pop radio for the past few years. "We Are Young" draws from classic rock, Broadway and hip-hop. "Somebody" has elements of folk, prog and electronic music. "Call Me Maybe" is effervescent pop. When the latter hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 in June, Jody Rosen suggested on Slate that the song's success might foreshadow a move away from previously dominant "club-bangers."

Rosen might be onto something. A few days before he wrote that, an architect of pop's current "club-banger" sound, the songwriter and producer Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald (he's written huge hits for Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry and Ke$ha, to name just a few) announced on Twitter that he was "working on a slow / mid summer jam.... everything is 128 BPM and 4 on the floor... need something different ..."

But radio is a slowly evolving beast, and it's easier to retrofit different sounding songs to the current mode. All three of the summer's "snowball hits" were given dance remixes, and it turns out that Gotye's song, while it sounds like something that emerged from a moodier, quieter corner of the synth-assimilating '80s, fits in best, if you bend it right. Bending it didn't take too much work. Where "Call Me Maybe" clocks in at 120 beats per minute and "We Are Young" at a pleasant 116 (it slows down to a crawling 93 bpm during the chorus), "Somebody That I Used To Know," at 129 bpm, could be the less-flashy pace car to the pop/dance pack. All remixers had to do was place some beats under those whispered verses and drop the bass when the chorus explodes (the large number of vaguely distinct remixes suggests that's exactly what happened, in many cases).

"Somebody" is different, but flexible, a perfect hit for a transitional moment in pop. "The reason that it went so quickly, and across so many formats, is that this song is special," Tombrink says. "It reached and resonated with the entire gamut of demographics."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/...onster-hit
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