Harvard law professor, head of a department in the Obama administration, and passionate Beatles fan, already famous author, Cass Sunstein reveals in How to Become Famous, both famous and forgotten or simply overlooked  artists and luminaries in music, literature, business, science, politics, and other fields, and explores why some individuals become famous and others don’t and offers a new understanding of the roles played by greatness, luck, and contingency in the achievement of fame. Fame is light lightning. Leonard da Vinci, Jane Austen, Oprah Winfrey, Bob Dylan, Taylor Swift all of them were struck.

Susntein’s How to Become Famous features  an eclectic journey through the fickle history of blockbuster success Star Wars which was written off as a flop before its release. Robert Zimmerman change his name to Bob Dylan and became a star, while fellow folk singer Connie Converse was unsuccessful in life  but is now attracting acclaim as his female equal. Sunstein calls on compelling studies from experimental psychology and behavioural science. Patterns of fame in which “the winners are spectacularly successful, and relatively few” mirror mathematical power law distributions, he says with surprising predictability. In the fascinating Music Lab experiment, which asked people to download tracks by unknown artists in an “artificial cultural market”, participants were more likely to enjoy songs they believed more people had downloaded.

Consider the most famous music group in history. What would the world be like if the Beatles never existed? This was question, posed by the playful, thought-provoking, 2019 film Yesterday, in which a young, completely unknown singer starts performing Beatles hits to world that has never heard them. Would the Beatles’s songs be as phenomenally popular as they are in our own Beatle-infused world?

 The movie asserts that they would, but is that true?  Was the success of the Beatles inevitable due to their maxine, matchless talent?

How to Become Famous Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be by Cass Sunstein, Harvard Business Review Press £24/$30, 272 pages.