The Ashcan

How to write a successful pop song

Posted on 05. Sep, 2010 by Simon in Music, Pop Culture

DY-NO-MIIIITE!!!

At work last week, I had a meeting with our head of IT about search engine optimization. I think most people have a rudimentary understand of what SEO is — making a website rank higher in internet search results. Intuitively, most of us probably even understand how this works (the most relevant, popular and credible pages are ranked highest).

But how does one make a page relevant, credible and popular? It’s definitely more technical than most think. My colleague delved into the nuances of Google’s algorithms, how to analyze and optimize page content to be ranked higher by Google and which techniques he found most effective.

Let’s just say whenever you Google something, the websites that appear on that first page of results are (usually) not there by coincidence — there was a ton of planning and work in the construction of the site that goes into getting that page read by your eyes.

It’s with SEO on my mind that I listened in rapt attention recently to an interview on CBC’s radio program, Spark, with author Jay Frank.

Frank, a veteran music industry executive, was talking about a book he had written titled FutureHit.DNA. The gist of his book is that the construction of popular music is evolving right alongside the music industries capability to monetize music.

The digital era has had a huge influence on the way people listen to music, obviously. What Frank posits however, is that these changes have also changed the way pop music is actually created — that currently, there are tenets by which music can be optimized in order to ensure a greater likelihood of success in today’s pop music market. Frank believes he can explain some of these rules.

In other words, much like how you probably don’t think about how the results of your Google search appear in the order they appear, the songs you hear on the radio have an equal amount of hidden work done in their crafting to get them in heavy rotation. And just like how at work I scheme about how to get certain pages ranked higher in Google, somewhere an artist is scheming about how to write a song not holistically, or with the hopes you will like the melody — but within the constraints of certain arrangements which they know will appeal to your subconscious.

At first the thought seems offensive. The idea some producer could conceivably create a song based on market research and successfully engineer it to be liked by us seems ludicrous. Marketing is a powerful tool, sure, but music is personal; and we like to believe we dictate our personal taste.

But do we? Although Frank seems to oversimplify at times during his interview when discussing how “the average user” (the fact he considers music listeners ‘users’ is interesting itself, but I digress) discovers and experiences music, the author also makes some salient points about pop music.

His observations — that the first seven seconds of a song are more crucial than ever before in music history, that there must be a bridge of some sort around the two minute mark and the need for a simple catchy hook to be repeated for something like a third of a song — certainly seem applicable to most of the current Billboard Hot 100.

Says Frank about how music consumption has changed:

Playing a bad song on radio results in a station switch and decreases loyalty. Playing a bad song on the new music services causes a song switch and increases loyalty. No wonder traditional media is in such trouble!

It’s intriguing to think of music as a quantifiably measured commodity; just another product competing for space on a supermarket shelf. I understand that this has always been the case with the music industry. Still, has it ever been so apparent to us, the end consumer? As we progress further into the digital age, Frank’s interview and book are a reminder that although how we experience music may not be homogenous, there is increasingly a tendency for culture to be manufactured. Like Naomi Klein talked about over a decade ago, the idea of “merchants of cool” is only getting more ubiquitous.

Something to think about the next time you hear the latest hit pop song on the radio and think “gee, that song sure is catchy”.

Tags: CBC Spark, Google, Jay Frank, merchants of cool, Naomi Klein, Pop music, why is Ke$ha popular?