The reasons behind the success of a musical theme are so many that predicting that a song will end up on the bestseller list is as difficult as forecasting the weather for a week from now: we are dealing with non-linear dynamic systems .
However, a new study suggests that if the song contains the second-person pronoun , it has a higher chance of success.
You and you
The most curious thing about this study, in which Jonah Berger has participated, is that when referring to the second person pronoun "you" it seems that what is really being done is not talking with the person who listens to the song, but with another person who is must one imagine. That is to say, that the singer, when saying "you", does not address the audience directly, but rather that "you" evokes another person in the mind of the listener .
Textual analysis of songs ranked on the Billboard charts (4,200 tracks), as well as controlled experiments of nearly 3,000 subjects, support this possibility, suggesting that cultural items that use more second-person pronouns are preferred and purchased more by the consumers. As Berger himself explains:
We argue that instead of addressing the audience directly, communicating norms, or encouraging perspective taking, second-person pronouns can encourage audiences to think of someone in their own lives.
It is not the first time that it has been studied how the inclusion of the second person pronoun connects with the buyer, as in this study a couple of years ago on online marketing.