What could be better than Malcolm Gladwell writing about music? His article for The New Yorker, "The Formulra," finds him explaining the New York-based company Platinum Blue, which examines music's underlying mathematical structure to predict the hit potential of an album or a song.

"This past spring, for instance, (Platinum Blue) analyzed 'Crazy,' by Gnarls Barkley. The computer calculated, first of all, the song’s Hit Grade—that is, how close it was to the center of any of those sixty hit clusters. Its Hit Grade was 755, on a scale where anything above 700 is exceptional. The computer also found that “Crazy” belonged to the same hit cluster as Dido’s 'Thank You,' James Blunt’s 'You’re Beautiful,' and Ashanti’s 'Baby,' as well as older hits like 'Let Me Be There,' by Olivia Newton-John, and 'One Sweet Day,' by Mariah Carey, so that listeners who liked any of those songs would probably like 'Crazy,' too."

Platinum Blue's Mike McCready explained how people have had similar preferences for hundreds of years.

"If you go back to the popular melodies written by Beethoven and Mozart three hundred years ago, they conform to the same mathematical patterns that we are looking at today. What sounded like a beautiful melody to them sounds like a beautiful melody to us. What has changed is simply that we have come up with new styles and new instruments. Our brains are wired in a way -- we assume -- that keeps us coming back, again and again, to the same answers, the same pleasure centers."