让一首歌流行有什么因素？一切都是“你”-网帖翻译-龙腾网

What question motivated you to do this research?

是什么问题促使你做这项研究？

Jonah Berger: We’ve been doing a lot of work around what’s called natural language processing, extracting behavioral insights from textual data. Everything we do — from this interview we’re recording, conversations we have with friends and family members, reviews we leave online, customer services calls, songs we listen to, articles we read — contains language. There’s a really exciting opportunity now to mine some of this data for behavioral insight to understand why songs or movies succeed, to understand why some customer service calls go better than others, and to use language to be more effective. Essentially, [we want] to extract wisdom from words, so we can all understand behavior better and be more effective.

伯格：我们已经围绕所谓的自然语言处理做了很多工作，从文本数据中提取对行为的洞察。我们所做的一切——从我们录制的采访、与亲友的对话、网上评论、客服电话、我们听的歌、读的文章——都包含着语言。
现在有一个非常令人兴奋的机会来挖掘这些数据，以获得对行为的洞察力，从而理解为什么这首歌曲或这部电影会成功，理解为什么一些客服的电话服务比其他人更好，或是如何使用语言来提高效率。本质上，我们希望从语言中汲取智慧，更好地理解行为，变得更有效。

In this particular case, we were interested in a question that I think many people have wondered about at one point in their lives. Why do some songs become hits? We all know hit songs. We hear them on the radio — we listen to them for years, if not decades, after they come out. Some songs become hits, others fail. Same thing with books, movies, and so on. Why do some of these things win out in the marketplace of ideas, and others fail? I think we’ve all wondered that as consumers, but as a marketing professor, this is something I’ve tried to study and to quantify.

在这个特殊的案例中，我们对一个问题很感兴趣，那就是很多人都曾有过疑问：为什么有些歌会成为热门歌曲？我们都知道热门歌曲。我们在收音机上听过它们，在它们出来之后，我们会听上好几年，甚至几十年。有些歌成为热门歌曲，而有些却默默无闻。书、电影等也一样。为什么这些文化产品中有一些在市场上火爆，而另一些却失败了？作为消费者，我们都很好奇。但作为一个营销教授，这是我试图研究和量化的主题。

We did a paper a few years ago where we found that atypical songs — songs that are about different things than [usual in] their genre — are more successful. Take country music, for example. Country music tends to talk a lot about things like girlfriends and cars. But looking at thousands of songs across multiple years, we found that songs about different things in their genres are more successful. In that project, we controlled for a variety of other factors: genre, artist, time period, and individual words. We controlled for pronouns. For example, I might use the word “I” or “me,” I might use the word “you,” I might talk about “we” or “us.” We controlled for these things to make sure that those weren’t driving our results.

几年前我们做了一篇论文，我们发现非典型歌曲——歌词中讨论不同类型事物的歌曲——更为成功。以乡村音乐为例。乡村音乐倾向于谈论很多事情，比如女朋友和汽车。听了数年来的数千首歌曲，我们发现，这种讨论不同类型事物的歌曲更为成功。在这个的研究项目中，我们控制了其他各种因素：音乐流派、艺术家、时间段和某个单词。我们还控制人称代词。例如，“我”、“你”、“我们”。我们控制这些元素以确保它们不会影响我们的结果。

We had hundreds of controls in that project, but we noticed one thing was particularly unusual. There was one class of words that we were using as a control variable that stood out for us. We started wondering why that might have worked out the way it did, and that’s really what started this new paper.

我们在那个研究项目中有数百个控件，但我们注意到有一件事特别不寻常。有一类词是我们用来作为控制变量的，让我们眼前一亮。我们开始怀疑为什么会有这样的结果。而这正是这篇新论文的出发点。

“We started with a simple question: Why do some songs become hits?” –Jonah Berger

“我们从一个简单的问题开始：为什么有些歌曲会成为热门歌曲？”——乔纳·伯格

In your study, you hypothesized that the success of a lot of popular songs boils down to one simple word: the pronoun “you.” Can you explain to us why?

在你的研究中，你假设很多流行歌曲的成功可以归结为一个简单的人称代词“你”。能解释一下为什么吗？

Berger: First, let’s make sure we understand what we mean by “you.” We use that word all the time. “What are you doing today? How are you feeling? You made me happy. You made me sad.” Songs use this word often. Think about Whitney Houston’s famous song, “I Will Always Love You.” Right? Think about Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” You can think about lots of songs that use the word “you” at some point.

伯格：首先，让我们确定“你”是什么意思。我们日常一直在用这个词。“你今天干什么？你感觉怎么样？你让我很开心。你让我伤心。“歌曲经常用这个词。想想惠特尼·休斯顿的名曲《我会永远爱你》（I Will Always Love You），对吧？皇后乐队的“我们会摇滚你”（We Will Rock You），你可以想到很多歌曲在某个时候用了“你”这个词。

You might be sitting and thinking, “Well, what do you mean? Of course, songs use the word ‘you.’ But I don’t really pay attention to whether songs use the word or not.” Even in our daily life, we don’t pay attention to the word very much. “You” is an example of what is called a style word. It’s sort of treated like noise. We pay very little attention to the words that go in between the content of what we talk about. Language researchers often talk about the difference between content versus style. If I have an important meeting, for example, I’m thinking about the content I’m sharing, what ideas I’m talking about within my presentation, but I don’t think a lot about the little words in between — articles like “and” or “the,” pronouns like “I” versus “we” or “you” that go between these more content-based words.

你可能会想，“好吧，你是什么意思？当然歌曲中会用到‘你’这个词，但我并不太在意啊？”是的，即使在日常生活中，我们也不太注意这个词。“你”是一个被称为风格词的例子。有点像嘈杂音。我们很少注意到这类词语。语言研究者经常谈论内容和风格的区别。例如，如果我有一场重要的会议，我会考虑分享什么内容，在演讲中谈论什么想法，但不会考虑太多一些连接词，比如“and”或“the”，或是人称代词，比如“我”与“我们”或“你/你们”，更多的是基于内容的文字。

The words don’t have any meaning by themselves. They are just connectives between larger themes. But what we saw in this preliminary analysis was the word “you” seemed to be lixed to success. Songs that said “you” more often — songs like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” or Queen’s “We Will Rock You” — seemed to be more successful. We started wondering, why might that be?

这些词本身没有太大意义，它们只是大主题之间的连接词。但我们在初步分析中看到，“你”这个词似乎与成功有关。更常说“你”的歌——像惠特尼·休斯顿的“我会永远爱你”或皇后乐队的“我们会摇滚你”——似乎更成功。我们开始纳闷，为什么会这样呢？
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

We started doing different analyses to try to figure it out. For example, we started with a data set of around 2,000 songs over three years. We went to the Billboard charts, scraped what songs were popular in different years and controlled for a variety of things like radio airplay, genre, artists and the content. We found that songs with more “you” were more successful. We started to do a little bit more work to understand why and what made songs with “you” more likely to be a hit.

我们开始做不同的数据分析来找出答案。例如，我们从三年内大约2000首歌曲的数据集开始。我们去看了热门歌曲排行榜，搜集了不同年份流行的歌曲，并对广播节目、流派、艺术家和内容进行了控制。我们发现歌词中有更多“你”的歌更成功。我们开始做更多的探究，了解为什么和什么使歌曲里有“你”更可能成为热门歌曲。

You point out in your paper that there is a difference between the subjective and obxtive use of “you.” Can you explain the difference and why the latter case is the more powerful one?

你在论文中指出，“你”的主客观用法有区别，你能解释一下这种区别吗？为什么后一种用法更有力？

Berger: Take “I Will Always Love You.” The subject is Whitney singing to someone else, saying, “I will always love you.” We might think she’s singing to us. We might think she’s singing to Bobby Brown, or whatever it might be. Same with Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” “We” is the subject of that sentence. Maybe it’s Queen, maybe it’s our sports team when we think about singing it, singing to the other team, “We will rock you.” You are the obxt of that sentence.

伯格：以“我会永远爱你”为例，主题是惠特尼对别人唱歌，说“我会永远爱你”，我们可能认为她在对我们唱，或是她在给鲍比·布朗唱歌，或者别的什么人。和皇后乐队的“我们会摇滚你”一样，“我们”是那句话的主语。也许是皇后乐队，也许是我们的球队，当我们想唱的时候，我们对另一支球队唱，“我们会摇滚你”。你就是那句话的对象。

That’s different than sentences in which “you” is the subject, “you” is the driver of the actions. So, “You hurt my feelings.” “You love me.” “You make me feel so happy.” All of those are cases where “you” is the actor or the subject of the sentence.

这与“你”是主语，是动作的推动者的句子不同。比如在“你伤害了我的感情”，“你爱我”，“你让我觉得很幸福”这些句子里，“你”是推动者，或是句子的主语。

“Natural language processing is a powerful tool to understand why some songs succeed and others fail, and how artists can impact that.”–Jonah Berger

“自然语言处理是一个强大的工具，可以帮助我们理解为什么有些歌曲成功了，有些歌曲失败了，以及艺术家们如何影响这种情况。”—— 乔纳·伯格

We started this project by thinking maybe it’s the traditional sense of “you.” When Whitney Houston sings, we sit there imagining Whitney singing to us. It makes us feel really good inside, and that’s why it’s successful. It didn’t seem to be that. Maybe we’re imagining Whitney’s singing to Bobby Brown, and so we’re following a really amazing narrative. It didn’t seem to be that. It seemed to be something a little bit more nuanced.

我们开始这个项目的时候想的是，也许这是传统意义上的“你”。当惠特尼·休斯顿唱歌时，我们坐在那里想象她为我们唱歌。这让我们内心感觉很好，或许这就是这首歌成功的原因。但好像不是这个原因。也许我们在想象惠特尼在给鲍比·布朗唱歌，所以我们是在听一段非常精彩的故事。但又好像不是这个原因。这种感觉似乎有点微妙。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

The idea is, when we hear a song like “I Will Always Love You” or “We Will Rock You,” we think about someone in our own life that we feel that way toward. I think this is quite interesting because this gets to the core of why we like cultural products. Why do we like books and songs and movies in the first place? Sometimes, we like to be transported to other places. We watch a sci-fi movie because we want to be transported to something outside our own lives. But other times, we [consume] these things and enjoy them because they make our own lives in some way better. They help us see our own relationships, our own social connections, as deeper and different as they might be otherwise. When Whitney Houston is singing, “I Will Always Love You,” we might be thinking about Whitney, and Whitney singing to Bobby, or Whitney singing to us. But what we actually find in our study is it causes us to think about, “This is really an amazing, romantic song. Who do I love?” It helps us think of a close other in our own lives.

这个想法是，当我们听到“我会永远爱你”或“我们会摇滚你”这样的歌词时，我们会想到自己生活中的某个人，我们会有这样的感觉。我认为这很有趣，因为这是我们为什么喜欢某一种文化产品的核心。
为什么我们一开始就喜欢书、歌曲和电影？因为有时我们喜欢被带到其他地方。我们看科幻电影是因为想被带到生活之外的地方。但其它时候，我们享受（消费）它们，是因为它们让我们的生活在某种程度上变得更好。这些作品帮助我们看到自己，以及我们的社会关系，让这种关系变得更深刻和不同。当惠特尼·休斯顿演唱《我会永远爱你》时，我们可能会想到关于惠特尼的事，惠特尼唱给鲍比，或者惠特尼唱给我们。实际上研究中发现，这让我们联想“这真是一首美妙浪漫的歌曲。我爱的是谁呢？”它帮助我们想到生活中的某个人，某个亲密的另一半。

I was in junior high school when Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” came out. I remember singing that song in my head to my girlfriend at the time and thinking about how much I cared about her. It activates that self in our own lives that makes us feel more connected to the song. Now, it’s not just this abstract song. It’s this thing that touches our own life and makes our own life feel a little better. That’s one reason “you” is so powerful; it helps us connect with others and like the cultural product more as a result.

当惠特尼·休斯顿的《我会永远爱你》走红时，我还在上初中。我记得当时在脑海里对着女朋友唱着那首歌，想着自己有多在乎她。它激活了生活中的自我，让我们感觉到与歌曲的联系更加紧密。因此它不仅仅是首抽象的歌，它触动了我们的生活，让我们的感觉更好。这就是“你”如此强大的一个原因——它帮助我们与他人建立联系，并因此更喜欢这个文化产品。

Let’s touch a little bit on your experiments. How do you actually go about studying this kind of thing?

让我们稍微谈谈你的实验吧。你是怎么着手研究这类事情的？

Berger: I know some folks are probably going, “Well, that’s cute.” Songs that have more “you’s” in them are more successful. But how do you know that’s the reason they’re more successful? There are hundreds of reasons why songs are successful. As I mentioned, we tried to control for various things, like a certain artist might be liked more, certain genres might be more or less popular, and more radio airplay is going to help songs be successful. We did that in the field, but then we also did some experiments. What we wanted to do is essentially manipulate the number of times a song had “you” in it and examine the lix to success.

伯格：我知道有些人可能会说“好吧，这挺扯的。”有更多“你”的歌曲更成功。但你怎么知道这就是他们更成功的原因？歌曲成功的原因有上百种。正如我提到的，我们试着控制各种因素，比如某个艺术家、某个流派可能更受欢迎，更多的广播节目将有助于歌曲的成功。但我们也做了一些实验。我们想做的是基本上控制一首歌中包含“你”的次数，并检查这一因素与成功的联系。

We started with something really simple. We asked a number of people in an experiment, “Think about a song that you’ve heard recently, and think about how much you like that song.” Then we went ahead and grabbed the lyrics to those songs and counted the number of “you’s” that appeared.

我们从非常简单的事情开始。我们在一个实验中问了一些人“想想你最近听过的一首歌，想想你有多喜欢那首歌。”然后我们抓起那些歌的歌词，数了数出现“你”的次数。

“‘The word ‘You’ can drive action, even outside of music.”–Jonah Berger

“‘你’这个词可以推动行动，甚至在音乐之外的领域。”——乔纳·伯格

What’s neat about work like this is, we’re not sitting there manually counting the number of you’s. We’re using natural language processing, automated textual analysis, to count it for us. We use scxts that run through the data and can pick off things like pronouns, counting the number of “you’s.” We find not only that people report liking songs with “you” more, just like what we found in our field data, but we find evidence for a mechanism. When we asked people, “How connected do you feel to others in your own life when listening to songs like this? How much does it enable you to imagine a personal other in your own life?” — when songs happen to have more “you’s” in them, people report imagining a personal other more. And that leads them to like the song more.

这类工作的巧妙之处在于，我们不是手动处理数据，而是使用自然语言处理软件，让文本自动分析和计算。我们使用的脚本在数据中运行，可以挑选代词，计算“你”的数量。我们发现，不仅人们更喜欢有“你”的歌曲，就像在现场访谈中发现的那样，我们还发现了为什么人们会喜欢此类歌曲的机制的证据。
当我们问他们“当你听这样的歌时，你觉得自己和生活中的其他人有什么联系？它能让你在多大程度上去想象自己生活中的某个人？——当歌曲中恰巧有更多的“你”时，人们会更加倾向于想象另一个人。这让他们更喜欢这首歌。

You could say, “Well, hold on. That’s nice. But you’re still not manipulating the number of you’s.” My co-author, Grant Packard, has a great songwriting talent. He put together some amazing songs where we could manipulate the number of “you’s.” They’re not chart-toppers, let me tell you, but we made up these songs and asked people to listen to different versions of the songs and read the words from different versions of the songs.

你可以说“等等，那很好。但你仍然没有控制‘你’的数量。”我的合著者，格兰特·帕卡德，有很好的作曲天赋。他改编了一些很棒的歌曲，我们可以通过这些歌曲来控制“你”的数量，虽然它们不是排行榜上的佼佼者，但是我们编辑了这些歌曲，让人们听不同的版本，并且读出不同版本歌曲的歌词。

We created one version of a song where there were lots of “you” pronouns – writing, for example, “I’ve known you for a while now,” where “you” is an obxt. We also created a no-personal-pronoun condition, where the song said things like, “I’ve known it for a while now.” All other lyrics are the same, but we’ve shifted that ‘you’ to become an “it.” We even did a third condition where we replaced the “you” pronouns with third-person pronouns. “I’ve known her for a while now,” or “I’ve known him for a while now.” In all these cases, the rest of the lyrics are the same. They’re identically decent, it turns out. But even doing that, people like the song more when it has more “you’s” in it. And they like it more because it encourages them to think about someone in their own life that they feel that way towards.

我们创作了一首歌的新版本，里面有很多“你”的代词，比如“我认识你有一段时间了”，其中“你”是宾语。我们还创造了一个没有人称代词的歌词，比如“我已经认识了一段时间了。”或者所有其他歌词都是一样的，但是我们把“你”改成了“它”。
我们甚至做了第三个条件，用第三人称代词替换了“你”代词。“我认识她有一段时间了，”或者“我认识他有一段时间了。”在所有这些情况下，其余的歌词都是一样的。事实证明，他们的确同样不错。但即使这样，当歌曲中有更多的“你”时，人们还是会更喜欢这首歌。他们更喜欢它，因为它激励着他们去想自己生活中的某个人。他们对此有这样的感觉。

What I think is really nice about this is we can not only say we have good causal evidence for the role of ‘you’ in encouraging people to like things and why, but we can also show it affects real songs in the field. If you’re a music artist, for example, and you’re trying to think about how to get people to like your songs more, this is certainly one way [to do that].

我认为这一点很好，因为我们不仅可以说我们有很好的因果证据证明“你”这个词在鼓励人们喜欢以及为什么喜欢所起的作用以及原因，而且我们还可以证明它影响了这个领域的真实歌曲。举个例子，如果你是一个音乐艺术家，你正努力思考如何让人们更喜欢你的歌，这当然是一种方法。

Are there lessons here for marketers beyond the music industry?

对于音乐行业以外的营销人员来说，这方面有什么可以学习的吗？

Berger: I think there are a few interesting things that come out of this paper. Specific for the music industry, if I’m a songwriter, the number of “you’s” may impact whether or not my song is successful. If I’m a music producer or a label thinking about investing in a particular artist, this might be useful to know and understand — mining lyrics as a source of insight. There have been lots of people over time who have argued they can understand why songs succeed. [But there has been] very little data actually looking at that. I think natural language processing is a really neat avenue to understand why some songs succeed and some fail, and how we can impact that.

我认为这篇论文中有一些有趣的地方。具体到音乐行业，如果我是一个词曲作者，“你”的数量可能会影响歌曲是否成功。如果我是一个音乐制作人或一个考虑投资于某个特定艺术家的唱片公司，了解和理解挖掘歌词作为一种洞察的来源可能会很有用。
一直以来，有很多人认为他们可以理解为什么这首歌会成功。但实际上很少有数据关注这一点。我认为自然语言处理是一个很好的途径来理解为什么有些歌成功了，有些歌失败了，以及我们如何影响它。

Beyond the music industry, I think this has a lot of interesting implications. There’s other work showing that the word “you” can increase attention. For example, if I’m reading an ad or a piece of mail or an e-mail, and a subject line says, “You need to read this,” or “You won’t believe what happens next” . You often see a lot of second-person pronouns used in very successful online content because it encourages us to pay attention. It draws our attention to something because, “Oh, wait. I want to know the implication of this for me.”

除了音乐产业，我认为还有很多有趣的含义。还有其他研究表明“你”这个词可以增加注意力。例如，如果我正在读一则广告或电子邮件，标题行上写着“你需要读这个”，或者“你不会相信接下来会发生什么”。你经常会看到很多非常成功的网络内容中在使用第二人称代词，因为它鼓励我们关注，它引起了我们的注意，因为你会想：“哦，等等。我想知道这对我意味着什么。”

“Companies are sitting on a wealth of textual data, that can provide deep insights into to consumers and markets more generally.” –Jonah Berger

“公司坐拥大量的文本数据，这些数据可以更广泛地为消费者和市场提供深入的见解。”—乔纳·伯格

I’ve even done some work looking at online written content for a large consumer-facing company, looking at how the language they use impacts customer service reactions, and the likelihood that people read content and find it helpful. Second-person pronouns play a big role there as well. So, “you” can be a nice word to drive action, even outside of music.

我甚至为一家面向消费者的大型公司做过一些在线书面内容研究，研究他们使用的语言如何影响客户服务反应，以及人们阅读内容并发现其有用的可能性。第二人称代词在那里也起着很大的作用。所以，即使在音乐之外，“你”可以是一个很好的词来推动行动。

Grant Packard has done some really nice work on this in customer services itself. It turns out we have to be really careful about using the word “you.” First, they find that “I” is more effective than “we.” Rather than saying, “We’ll take care of that for you,” or “We’ll be happy to solve your problem,” if I’m a customer service agent, using the word “I” and taking responsibility, saying, “I’ll solve that for you, I’m really sorry that happened,” rather than distancing it with “we,” is much better.

帕卡德在客户服务方面的语言领域做了一些非常好的工作。事实证明，我们在使用“你”这个词时必须非常小心。首先，他们发现“我”比“我们”更有效。如果我是一名客服人员，使用“我”这个词并承担责任，而不是说“我们会为你解决这个问题”或“我们很乐意解决你的问题”，而是说：“我会为你解决的，我真的很抱歉发生了这样的事，”这样比用“我们”有更好的效果。

But “you” also matters. I was having an issue at home a couple of days ago with my Nest thermostat. I called up Google, and they said, “Have you tried this? You should try that. Did you think about doing this?” It turns out when you use the word “you” a lot in that customer service context, it can make people feel like you think they’re responsible. Customers can get really annoyed about that.

但“你”也很重要。几天前我家里的Nest恒温器出了点问题。我打电话给谷歌，他们说“你试过这样吗？你应该试下。你有想过这样做吗？”事实证明，当你在客户服务中经常使用“你”这个词时，会让人们觉得你认为他们自己有责任。顾客对此会非常恼火。
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Many companies now are doing some version of what we call social listening — listening to the chatter on social media about products and brands and services, and mining that for insight. Social media is a useful channel with a set of useful data. But it’s not the only useful data out there. There’s really lots of opportunity to mine more of this data for more insight

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