Popular songwriting has a particular responsibility of being, quite literally, popular. There are many ways to measure popularity, but in the popular music world, it’s been typically measured in sales. These days, popularity is measured in additional ways: clicks, likes, and that sort of thing.
But ultimately even clicks and likes are just a kind of stop on the way to sales. Even if you stream something for free on a free site like YouTube, you’ll get ad revenue (another kind of sale), and you’ll likely get new fans that might come to your concerts, so again, it comes down to sales.
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In your own songwriting, if you don’t aspire to offer something to the music world that’s in some way innovative — if you’re simply churning out what other songwriters are doing — it’s hard to build a fan base. That’s because you need something in your songs that’s going to set them apart from other songs out there, something that will allow you to make your own statement to the world.
So it will be hard to generate sales if you aren’t stepping out and offering something unique, because your old fans will find your music predictable, and your potential new fans won’t hear anything in your songs that makes them want to pay closer attention to what you’re doing.
The Problem With Sales as a Metric
As with practically everything in the arts, using sales as a metric is part of a tricky balancing act. For good songwriters who view their songs as an art form, measuring success by counting money is often very unsatisfying. Most good composers of songs that I know don’t like necessarily using revenue as an indicator of musical success.
For those songwriters, they tend to look at songs as something that should please themselves first and foremost. And if they happen to be happy with the song, that’s what really counts. The feeling is that if they think they’ve written a good song, then others who hear the song will like it as well: even if not a lot of people agree that the song is great, the ones who do like it will be enough for them.
This is why we often hear of tension between producers and artists. Producers are more likely to use the sales metric to measure success, and they’ll be nervous of singer-songwriters who create songs that might be hard to sell.
In the end, it comes down to your own personal definition of success. And whether the industry folks want to know this or not, it’s true: sales may not be your most important metric of success. Because there are other ways to evaluate success, and these three come immediately to mind:
- Satisfying self-expression: You write songs simply to give an artistic voice to your feelings.
- Songs for your close friends and family: You may not have a desire to put your songs out there for the rest of the world to hear, but you will want friends and family to feel entertained by your music.
- Songwriting as therapy: You use songwriting to help calm your inner soul and mind, and to keep you feeling balanced and at ease with the world.
I think it’s important for every songwriter to take a close look at this issue, and determine (and occasionally redetermine) what it is that makes you feel successful as a songwriter. Unless you’ve given this some careful consideration, you don’t really know what success will mean for you.
And whether it’s sales, or just a feeling of personal satisfaction, everyone needs to be able to answer that question in order to be able to successfully evaluate how you’re doing.
Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter.
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