Author: IJ

It Ain’t Right

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One of my favourite songs a couple of years back was the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams. I was grieving the death of my father who died at the age of 91 of Alzheimers just before than and that song just perked me up out of my gloom.  I even wrote a post about it on my I Like Songs blog.  Well, I didn’t write much, I just wanted to feature it.

It’s no surprise that the song was an enormous hit.

What IS a surprise is an article I read just recently about the income it generated from Pandora.  There were 43 million streams.  And what did it earn?  A measly $2700.  Yes, to some of you $2700 sounds like a lot of money.  But 43 million streams?

This is why I removed my music from all of the music streaming services more than a year ago. Granted, I wouldn’t have expected to have 43 million streams, but I did expect to be fairly compensated for the streams I DID have, and that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

Then I did a little research just for my own satisfaction.  It costs $4.99 a year to join Pandora at the time of this writing.  Let’s just round that up to $5.  A website I stumbled across listed 37 “interesting” Pandora statistics, and they listed about 76.5 million active Pandora listeners.  That comes to about $382.5 million bucks.  But wait.  There are actually 250 million subscribers, so Pandora is making $1.25 BILLION a year.

So who is getting all that money?

There have been countless other articles lately bemoaning music streaming services, so I’m not going to tell you anything new here.  Those of us who grew up on radio got used to the idea of it being “free”.  Well, it wasn’t really free, it was just paid for by somebody else.  Advertisers paid radio stations to run their ads, and radio stations paid PRO’s (performer rights organizations) to play their artists’ songs.  Why shouldn’t music streaming services pay the same per play?  I don’t understand why fair pay was not implemented at the very beginning.

The fact is that it is really difficult to explain to non-musicians that artists and bands need to be fairly compensated for their work.  All music lovers want is free music.

But it is not hard to explain to a music streaming service that they should be giving a much larger slice of the pie to the people who created their content.  And no, that doesn’t mean charging listeners more.  It simply means not giving so much to the fat, belching CEO’s who could care less about the music.

Okay, rant over.

IJ

Plagiarism: What’s Yours Ain’t Mine

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Bob Dylan

I remember the first song I plagiarized.  It was “Leaving On A Jet Plane” by John Denver.  I was probably only about 12 years old at the time because I had likely heard the song on the radio sometime in 1969 when it was first released.  I didn’t know the word “plagiarism” then, let alone understand the concept of it.

I was in the middle of writing a song called “Home” (sorry, I took that title before you, Edward Sharpe and Phillip Phillips!).  Instinctively I came up with a little instrumental bridge, but then I decided to hum over top of it.  Part of the melody I was humming was the first two lines of the chorus of Leaving On A Jet Plane.  I remember the subtle feeling that the melody wasn’t mine, but it didn’t bother me too much at the time!

Every songwriter has occasionally come to the point in the writing of a song, or after finishing it, when they’ve wondered if it isn’t something they’ve heard before.  I remember a few times later on in my songwriting life, realizing that I had unknowingly plagiarized something and being utterly disappointed in myself.  Damn!  And I really liked that one too!

It might help to know that even the songwriting giants make the mistake of accidentally plagiarizing from time to time.  One famous case was the Rolling Stones’ song “Anybody Seen My Baby?”, in which the chorus melody was pretty much exactly the same as k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving”.  Mick Jagger and Keith Richards claimed they had never heard the song, and that might be true. But practically speaking, they would have only had to be somewhere where that song was playing to subliminally pick it up.  You’ve all experienced how a melody can appear in your head, even when you don’t recognize the song or where it came from.  Was it playing in the coffee shop when you were ordering your latte?

The result was that Jagger and Richards included k.d. land and her songwriting partner Ben Mink as co-writers on their song.  That way, any royalties earned would be split between all of them.  A nice, simple solution.  But it’s not always so nice.

The case of Marvin Gaye’s family vs. Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke lead all the way to court.  I wrote about this in an earlier blog. When Thicke and Williams were writing “Blurred Lines”, they were deliberately trying to come up with something that sounded the same as Gaye’s 1977 song “Got To Give It Up”.  Well, it sounded SO much the same that they lost the subsequent lawsuit filed by Gaye’s family.  Be careful what you wish for.

Bob Dylan was once called out by Joni Mitchell for being a plagiarist because of Bob’s habit of “borrowing” from earlier folk songwriters and poets to craft his own songs.  There’s a good article all about that here. He had no shame, however. That’s Bob for ya. Actually, folk music songwriters young and old did a lot of plagiarizing, except the word used was “pastiche”.  In the dictionary, pastiche is defined in one way as: “a piece of writing, music, etc., that is made up of selections from different works”.  That’s the way Bob thought of it I guess.

Many of you remember the art of “sampling”, where a small section of a well-known recording was actually used in a newer recording.  In the beginning, the original artists were not paid any royalties for that little snippet, but eventually the laws changed and they were compensated.  Sampling didn’t continue on very much after that, needless to say!

The truth is that when first we start writing songs we tend to repeat pretty much everything we’ve ever heard before.  Our lyrics can sound cheesy and boring, our melodies uninspired, all because we’re simply regurgitating our past playlists and nothing is new.  How aware we are of that depends on the person.  Many realize when their songs sound dull and boring, but they often don’t know why.  Plagiarism, then, is as natural as speaking your first words when you were an infant.  You repeat what you hear, and what’s the harm in that?  It only gets sticky when the money starts rolling in.

My little song “Home” never made it any further than an old cassette tape, complete with the rip off section of Leaving On A Jet Plane.  I’ll file that under “pastiche” :-).

IJ

Production Over Songwriting?

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The question today is:  Has production become more important than songwriting in today’s music?  It’s not a new question, but it’s important to revisit from time to time. I actually saw a discussion of this on Reddit and it got me to thinking about it again.

Let’s first separate production from arrangement.  Arrangement involves the musical part of the song;  who plays what where and for how long, whereas the production is the more technical aspect;  volume, effects, mastering and everything in between.

Continue reading “Production Over Songwriting?”

Songwriting Topics

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writeI have written about this before, but thought I would do so again after reading another songwriting blog that suggested what the five “most successful” songwriting topics are.  They were listed as “love, country, religion, nature, sports”.  I want to take each of those topics and discuss them a little further.  These are my opinions, of course, you might want to argue with me in the comments section below :-).

First of all, I’m assuming that the writer is talking about “success” in some sort of commercial way, or least in terms of popularity on YouTube or other digital means. Success can be a pretty relative thing, but I’ll go by that assumption.

I can certainly agree with “love” being a successful topic.  I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I guessed that probably 75% of the songs you hear on the radio are about some aspect of love;  new love, lost love, jealous love, old love…the list goes on and on. You can’t go wrong using love as your songwriting topic.

The second, country, was actually described as “about the country”, basically describing songs about patriotism. I don’t think you’ll find too many songs on YouTube or on the Billboard Top 100 on a REGULAR basis, that are patriotic.  So I would broaden that topic to “places”.  Places can be anything from a city (there have been lots of famous and successful songs over the years about cities!), to a spot where you used to meet someone (okay,  that’s bordering on a love song, I know), to a neighbourhood you grew up in, to your room or even a job place.  Patriotism might feel good to you, but it can often become cheesy, so be careful with that topic on its own.

The next topic was described as religion and religion is a subject that is rather audience specific.  For instance, there are Christian songwriting websites and messageboards out there, so I am certainly aware that there are songwriters who write solely in that genre, and it is indeed a genre.  Within the Christian community there are radio stations with hit songs and big name artists.  I do remember a time when gospel songs were occasionally on the playlists of mainstream radio, but that doesn’t happen any more.  Country radio often has its share of songs with religious overtones, so a person might have some success with a country audience.  So I’m on the fence as to whether this topic can be potentially successful outside of its specific audience.

Nature is the next topic.  Oddly enough, the first song that comes to mind is an old one written by Eddie Rabbit and performed by Elvis Presley.  I don’t know why, but “Kentucky Rain” just popped into my head!  It’s really not about rain, though, or Kentucky.  It’s an excellent title, but it is…guess what?  A love song!  Nature in and of itself seems a rather benign topic.  Another one that comes to mind (sorry, these are all old!) is “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver.  It takes place in the Rocky Mountains, but it is really a coming-of-age song.  So I think that nature is probably used more as a metaphor for something else, rather than a topic in and of itself.

Here are the most recent (as of 8/20/14) Billboard  top 5 hot pop songs and their topics:

  • Rude! by Magic – love song about a guy asking a girl’s father for his daughter’s hand in marriage
  • Stay With Me by Sam Smith – love song
  • Am I Wrong? by Nico and Vinz – about trying to stand up for what’s right, a philosophical song
  • Latch by Disclosure – love song
  • Boom Clap by Charli XCX – love song

And the hot rock top 5 songs:

  • A Sky Full of Stars by Coldplay – love song
  • Habits (Stay High) by Tove Lo – love song
  • Pompeii by Bastille – believe it or not, a song about Pompeii.  Imagine that!  You could put this under my category of “place”
  • Come With Me Now by Kongos – a song about overcoming obstacles
  • Ain’t It Fun by Paramore – a “you’re a jerk” song

The hot country top 5 songs:

  • Burnin’ It Down by Jason Aldean – love song
  • Dirt by Florida Georgia Line – well, it’s about dirt, but as a metaphor for “this is where I grew up and want to come back, get married and build a house” .  I like the lyrics. This fits in with my idea of “place” as a topic.  It’s a bit of a stretch calling it a “nature” song.
  • American Kids by Kenny Chesney – now this one definitely has religious references and patriotism like “We were Jesus-save-me, blue-jean-baby, born in the USA”, but it’s mostly about the past and growing up.
  • Drunk On A Plane by Dierks Bentley – a breaking-up type love song
  • Bartender by Lady Antebellum – a “pour me a drink so I can forget him” love song

Okay, so let’s compare with the original list of five topics.  Out of the three genres with fifteen songs in total, I’ll see which topics are included:

  1. Country (patriotism) – 1 (well it wasn’t the actual topic, but because it was referenced to, I included it.
  2. Religion – 1 (I counted that too, in the same song)
  3. Nature – 0
  4. Sports – 0
  5. Love – 9!
  6. Other – 6

So what do we learn from this?  First my statistics were off a little.  I said that 75% of the songs out there are love songs.  Nine out of fifteen songs makes it closer to 60%.  But you’re pretty safe writing a love song.  Religion, country, nature and sports, not so much.  And, there are a lot of other topics to write about…even Pompeii!  So push the envelope, be imaginative, write about what you know (or make it up!) and don’t restrict yourself.  Your idea might be better than any other song idea on the charts!

IJ