In other words, because pop music mutates to match what's en vogue, no one really knows what will succeed. Chart-topping pop songs—ones that are dance-along-able, that get stuck in your head—will always need a little something extra, something catchy. (Think the current '80s-influenced sound of Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk," Maroon 5's "Sugar," and Taylor Swift's "Style," or the "Soar" described by Daniel Barrow at The Quietus in 2011 that dominated songs like Katy Perry's "Firework.") Anyone can grab some blank sheet music and scrawl out the beginnings of a pop song, but no one can predict whether that song will resonate with enough listeners to make it a sensation.

That said, record companies and artists have tried to reverse-engineer songs, thinking that doing so would solve the problem. Susan Schmidt-Horning, the author of Chasing Sound and a professor of history at St. John's University, points out that people have reverse-engineered specific sounds—rock and roll in particular. Musicians would study the distortions made by electric instruments, recycling elements into their songs and creating new ones.

And pop music does get, well, formulaic because of it. Musical copies appear again and again. Artists try to recreate the sound that made them pop phenoms. It's easy to find mashups of any combination of hits, given the right beat.

But tearing a song apart and building a similar one from its components has never produced consistent success. Instead, the world of pop music depends on the way we create and listen to music. The pop star of the future is not going to be a hybrid Katy Perry-Miley Cyrus-Carly Rae Jepsen robot that blends hooks and sounds together to write the ultimate catchy pop song. The pop star of the future is going to look something more like Hatsune Miku.

Miku is a Japanese pop artist, an avatar of sorts who can "sing" and "perform" on stage when she's projected onto a screen in 3-D. Created by (the aptly named) Crypton Future Media, she is a Vocaloid, a program that uses recorded human voices in a database to sing. And she's got die-hard fans—enough of them to make her a household name in Japan, an opening act for Lady Gaga, and a mind-boggling guest on Late Show With David Letterman:

She was also the subject of a New York magazine profile in November that breathlessly declared, "She is, depending on whom you ask, a harbinger of a radically collaborative future in pop music or a holographic horsewoman of the apocalypse."

It's easy to understand the latter sentiment. Miku doesn't physically exist, and if people are becoming rabid fans of an avatar, how soon do we all begin worshipping computer-generated, soulless pop culture entirely? (Not anytime soon.) How "live" is a live Hatsune Miku performance if she can perform at the same time in two places halfway around the world from one another? (As "live" as it can be.) Can an avatar have fans, even if she can't pose for photographs or dole out autographs? (Yes.) Can an avatar be a celebrity? (Of course.)