visits the Website and listens to the music. Other companies
play songs over the phone or send sample CDs to a stable of
raters. Hundreds of music listeners end up voting on particular
songs, and over the years the rating systems have become
extraordinarily sophisticated. Pick the Hits, for instance, a
rating service outside Washington, D.C., has a base of two
hundred thousand people who from time to time rate music,
and they have learned that if a song aimed, say, at Top 40 radio
(listeners 18 to 24) averages above 3.0 on a score of 1 to 4
(where 1 is “I dislike the song”), there’s roughly an 85 percent
chance that it will be a hit.
These are the kinds of services that Kenna’s record was
given to — and the results were dismal. Music Research, a
California-based firm, sent Kenna’s CD to twelve hundred
people preselected by age, gender, and ethnicity. They then
called them up three days later and interviewed as many as
they could about what they thought of Kenna’s music on a scale
of o to 4. The response was, as the conclusion to the twenty-
five-page “Kenna” report stated politely, “subdued.” One of his
most promising songs, “Freetime,” came in at 1.3 among
listeners to rock stations, and .8 among listeners to R&B
stations. Pick the Hits rated every song on the album, with two