What’s timeless from 2013?

If we were to review “Best of 2013” lists, Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines would be the cultural touchstones. Get Lucky won the Grammy for Record of the Year and Blurred Lines was nominated.

If my children's children were to ask what we listened to in 2013, I'd pick a Pharrell collaboration or someone like Calvin Harris.

But that was two years ago, and we expect popularity to fade. Based on data from the past six decades, it’s highly likely that what’s remembered from 2013 will be a song that never hit #1 on Billboard, an underground track from an artist with a cult following.

Today, one track has an interesting trajectory: OneRepublic’s Counting Stars. Counting Stars never had breakout success following its release, yet it’s managed to stay in the cultural zeitgeist for more than a year after its peak.

Why? One hypothesis: Counting Stars had a chance to spread organically via word-of-mouth since its April 2013 release, cascading from indie music circles to casual listeners. Get Lucky, on the other hand, dominated music channels in its heyday. Most people likely heard the track via mass media rather than friends.

The Curse of Success

Lana Del Rey’s Young and Beautiful and Arctic Monkey’s Do I Wanna Know look like modern equivalents of Etta James' At Last or Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin': no success on its release, but steady growth over time. Today in 2015, both tracks are at parity with Royals and Get Lucky, and you’d probably never guess it.

When a track experiences a rapid ascent, it’s a deal with the devil: it achieves commercial success, but it also saturates culture. There’s listening fatigue. It’s taboo to love. It’s kinda similar baby name fads: names like Jennifer, Shirley, Ashley became popular so quickly that it became uncool.

As much as I love Get Lucky, it’s a “Shirley”: pervasive popularity, but no street-cred and potential for longevity. Playing it at a party might be like hearing Mambo No. 5, a track we love to hate.

The artists who have cult-followings and underground appeal: it’s a signal for some undefined musical quality that’s impossible for a hit song to replicate. Perhaps it means that they are culturally ahead of their time. Or perhaps generations will feel obligated to share it, for fear of it fading.

Either way, time will tell.

Like this? It's part of a series about quantifying the cultural relevance of music. See Part 1: The Longevity of No Diggity and Part 2: When Future Generations Don’t Remember the Classics.