I used to think a lot about how they decide the songs to be released as singles from an album. The most shocking one for me at least was that (IIRC) Under The Bridge was originally not going to be a single. How do they decide which songs are good enough to be released? How do they decide how many songs to release as singles?

Or maybe a better explanation would be with tv episodes in a series. You would want to put the good stories at the start to get people hooked, but wouldn’t that mean the not so good stories become a sort of filler for the season?

My answer is that the only way to get by this is to always make sure you’re doing your best work, to always put your best foot forward, to make sure that the quality is there in everything you produce.

In the end, who decides if something is good or not? If your target audience like it, isn’t that good enough? Then I guess it’s just a matter of expanding your target audience, or your target audience expanding itself through the network effect.

Either way, it’s pretty funny how the term jumping the shark came to be. I vaguely remember seeing that episode when I was little (they had re-runs of Happy Days on TV in NZ). But it’s odd because they would have had a big enough audience that that shouldn’t have mattered as much… but what do I know!?