{"id":45,"date":"2024-06-21T02:48:44","date_gmt":"2024-06-21T02:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/?p=45"},"modified":"2024-06-21T02:48:44","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T02:48:44","slug":"the-hello-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/?p=45","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cHello\u201d World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Have you ever been searching for a song on your favorite music service and scrolled through all the songs that matched your search. All<\/strong> of them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, top of the pop billboards at the time of this writing is Adele\u2019s \u201cHello.\u201d I scrolled for a while and got to at least 1,962 songs named \u201cHello,\u201d<\/strong> before I stopped scrolling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It feels like looking into the grand canyon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few things are immediately apparent-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. All comes to pass.<\/em> <\/strong>To illustrate, Madonna too is in the Hello list, but her Hello didn\u2019t last; I can\u2019t see why Adele\u2019s would.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. The top dog takes it all.<\/strong><\/em> Adele\u2019s variant has 250 million spotify listens. Most of the\u00a0Hellos have < 2,000 listens. Adele\u2019s Hello very well may have more (spotify) listens than all of the other 2 thousand combined.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. It\u2019s harder than it seems<\/strong><\/em>. When all the songs you know of are big hits, it can be hard to realize just how many unpopular songs are out there.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. This goes deeper than \u201cHello.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>I just picked the top song on the billboard at the moment, but it could have been any songs. Or any poem, or book, blog, or famous person.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    And a few things are less obvious-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      \n
    1. Why does the top dog take it all?<\/strong>\u00a0Why do 99% of songs never reach the radio? Are most of these songs just bad?<\/em> Is it simply that it\u2019s ten times easier to write a bad song than a good one? Or is it that the music industry\u00a0builds pop celebrities<\/em> for profit, and radios buy in? Or is it that audiences don\u2019t want so much choice, that we only like a song the 3rd time we hear it so we focus on a few new ones?<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    2. So two thousand people chose the same word for their title. Is unique art only a fantasy?\u00a0<\/strong>From the pool of a million english\u00a0words, two thousand artists all picked the same one as the title<\/em> of their song. I know this\u00a0because I\u00a0searched by title. How many of these songs share the same key chords?<\/em> How many of these songs are\u00a0about the same thing? <\/em>Artists, like the rest of us, like to think they are doing\u00a0the unique, but maybe the pool of possibilities split among all of humanity isn\u2019t big enough\u00a0to allow us each a distinctly unique idea, song title, or life story.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    3. So where do they all end up? <\/strong>There must be at least\u00a080 hours of \u201cHello,\u201d on spotify. Which makes me think there must be enough music on spotify that I couldn\u2019t listen to it all if I dedicated the rest of my waking life to it. And people are still writing music. Is it just a never-ending cycle of new genres with a small fraction\u00a0surviving into each new generation with the vast musical history resting in peace at the bottom of our searches? Or do we someday exhaust the unique musical possibilities?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Have you ever been searching for a song on your favorite music service and scrolled through all the songs that matched your search. All of them? For example, top of the pop billboards at the time of this writing is Adele\u2019s \u201cHello.\u201d I scrolled for a while and got to at least 1,962 songs named \u201cHello,\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46,"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/46"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/think-twice.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}