Related, on the cutting edge: a study in which subjective likability scores for music did not correlate with sales over the next three years, but activity in the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens (while listening to the music) did.

That's actually really useful for me. I've long struggled to come up with, for my esthetics essay, an explanation for why people overwhelmingly choose supposedly inferior cultural goods, as the unpopularity of superior goods suggests that my central thesis is false. Hyperbolic discounting is obvious, of course, but this sort of thing really helps.