Familiarity

Our brain subconsciously always look for anything familiar. It is our brain’s intent of filtering out the things that we already knew so we can focus on the things that matter to us, otherwise it would take extreme mental effort to focus on many things at once. The sound of the humming engines of the cars on the road, the gentle breeze rumbling the window pane, the chirping birds on the tree, are familiar sounds drowned by our subconsciousness so we can hear the sound waves coming from the radio or the other person in a phone call. “Our brain craves familiarity in music because familiarity is how we manage to hear without becoming distracted by all the sound.”¹

Familiarity, as the research indicates, in the music industry is a significant factor for when a song becomes a hit. “Hey Ya!” by Outkast was predicted to be a huge success when the music executives first heard the song but the listeners says otherwise. Turns out, majority of the people listening to a station playing “Hey Ya!”, switch off to another station the first 30 seconds hearing it while others reported they hated it. The reason is that the song is nothing they’ve ever heard before as it was a new genre–a fussion of funk, rock and hip-hop–, a novelty at the time.

To make something stick or “exotic to familiar”, one must camouflage the unfamiliar into something more familiar. The “Hey Ya!”, after failing massively in its initial release, was sandwiched into the hit songs of the time. It was played before and after the already popular sticky songs. Later, “Hey Ya!” by Outkast won a Grammy and sold more than 5.5 million albums earning radio stations millions of dollars.

When things become familiar to us, we become as our brain labels it harmless or safe, or something that can be ignored. When we are trying to make things into new #Habits, we must camouflage the novel into familiars.