Predicting a Movie’s Future Popularity

I just watched this very interesting video of a lecture given by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point. Gladwell talks about how he met this guy who measured several variables of thousands of songs. When you were too see all these songs as a scatter plot, you just see a bunch of random dots, but when you just show the songs that we hits you see several distinct clusters. In theory you should be able to predict the popularity of a new song based on how well it fit into an existing cluster. Gladwell then talks about these two other guys who have been trying to do the same thing with movies. Some of the predictions they were able to make were pretty amazing. This video is definitely worth checking out.