  In the modern era where highly-commodified cultural products compete heavily
for mass consumption, finding the principles behind the complex process of how
successful, "hit" products emerge remains a vital scientific goal that requires
an interdisciplinary approach. Here we present a framework for tracing the
cycle of prosperity-and-decline of a product to find insights into influential
and potent factors that determine its success. As a rapid, high-throughput
indicator of the preference of the public, popularity charts have emerged as a
useful information source for finding the market performance patterns of
products over time, which we call the on-chart life trajectories that show how
the products enter the chart, fare inside it, and eventually exit from it. We
propose quantitative parameters to characterise a life trajectory, and analyse
a large-scale data set of nearly $7\,000$ songs from Gaon Chart, a major weekly
Korean Pop (K-Pop) chart that cover a span of six years. We find that a
significant role is played by non-musical extrinsic factors such as the
established fan base of the artist and the might of production companies in the
on-chart success of songs, strongly indicative of the commodified nature of
modern cultural products. We also review a possible mathematical model of this
phenomenon, and discuss several nontrivial yet intriguing trajectories that we
call the "Late Bloomers" and the "Re-entrants" that appears to be strongly
driven by serendipitous exposure on mass media and the changes of seasons.
