by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website:
There are many possible yardsticks for determining your success as a songwriter. For writers of hit songs, success is how many recordings you sell. But there are different ways to measure success.
Sales are a big determining factor with most songwriters. It explains why so many of the great songs out there wind up in advertisements to sell anything and everything from cars to cold remedies. If your song sold millions, an ad agency knows that your song had a big social impact. And then selling your song to that ad agency extends the life of your song and gives you, the songwriter, even more money. In that sense, producers of recordings are not so much into what is good, but rather what is popular. Then the argument becomes: Isn’t music that’s popular good?
Many of today’s hit songs won’t be being analyzed by musicologists decades from now. Once the people who made those songs the hits they are have gone from this planet, those songs will likely disappear completely from the radar, possibly of interest only to historians. Their success was their impact on the youth society of the day, their message only really having relevance for a metaphorical blink of an eye. Whether the song was good or not is a judgment call, and when all is said and done, probably a somewhat irrelevant judgment call.
Surely there must be other measures of what makes something good. For the progressive rock artists of the early to mid 70s, commercial success was not that important. If you could sell enough albums to make your life as a musician at least worthwhile, you could keep creating your music. Measuring success, for those prog rock composers, was similar to how classical composers measured success. Sales numbers had little to do with it. It had more to do with musical goals, not monetary ones.
So what is a musical goal? I often write about the balance between innovation and tradition when writing songs, and that if you want your song to sell, you need to move the balance strongly toward tradition. That means making sure that you use many strong chord progressions, use mainly diatonic notes in your melody (i.e., notes that come specifically from the key your song is in), and use a form that is easily followed by your audience (verse – chorus – verse – chorus – bridge, etc…). To make your song musically interesting will usually require you to add innovative elements that explore your sense of creativity and imagination. That may mean using chord progressions that are possibly off the beaten track, create melodies that don’t necessarily follow predictable patterns, lyrics that are a bit more abstract than usual, etc.
In doing all of that, the first noticeable result is that you will lose audience. Most people have little experience with music as an art form, and think of it more as pure entertainment. They don’t want to think deeply about what they’re using for their entertainment; they just want to be entertained. So the disadvantage of delving deeper into more sophisticated composition is that your sales will likely plummet. The advantage is that such music has longer staying power: it’s more likely that the audience will grow for your music as your career proceeds. And more people will be wanting to hear your music long after you have finished writing music. The more innovative you are, the more you set yourself apart from others, and the more (eventually) people will want to know how and why your music works.
Keep in mind that innovation does not necessarily mean good. But while predictable will get you an immediate audience, and will reward you with sales, that success will likely be fleeting.
So one hundred years from now, I fully expect the early music of Yes to be studied in university music programs, but don’t expect to find a course focusing on the Bay City Rollers.