John Seabrook

"Prepare to enter the outrageous new world of Nobrow, where the old cultural distinctions - highbrow (Wagner's Ring), middlebrow (Masterpiece Theater), and lowbrow (the latest MTV video) - cease to exist. John Seabrook raises the curtain on an onrushing cultural phenomenon: the melding of culture with the marketing of culture and the culture of marketing.". "He shows us how Nobrow increasingly defines the great American audience that now follows the Three Tenors on tour, cheers rock groups like Radish (whose fifteen-year-old lead singer wins a multi-million-dollar recording contract and fifteen minutes of celebrity), obsesses on the prequel to Star Wars, and is as hip to promotion as to performance."--BOOK JACKET.

There's a reason hit songs offer such guilty pleasure--they're designed that way. Over the last two decades a new type of hit song has emerged, one that is almost inescapably catchy. Pop songs have always had a "hook," but today's songs bristle with them: a hook every seven seconds is the rule. The song machine explores what the new hits may be doing to our brains and listening habits, especially as music services use streaming data to gather music into new genres invented by algorithms based on listener behavior. Revelatory and original, this book will change the way you listen to music.