Singer Leona Lewis has been accused of plagiarism, after releasing a song called “Collide”, which has exactly the same piano track as a song by up and coming DJ Avici. This time, when listening to both, there is no doubt in my mind that they are the same. The piano melody is even the same key…no attempt to hide anything there! Listen for yourself. First Leona Lewis’ track “Collide”:
Business
How Commercials Are Selling Songs
I don’t really know when it first happened, but I do know that there was a period in the 1990’s and 2000’s when television advertisers began to use oldies songs (by “oldies” I mean songs from the 70’s and earlier) to attract people of my generation and older to their products. At first there was a bit of a backlash as artists were accused of “selling out”. But I’m sure that producers, publishers and agents everywhere began to pay attention, wondering if there were ways to get THEIR artists songs in commercials in order to create another gold mine of music royalties.
It still happens that older songs find their way into commercials, but more often these days, it’s newer songs and artists who are gaining recognition through television. You hear the song and Google the advertiser and almost immediately you’ll be able to find it. And that’s the beauty if it; not only does it promote the product, in turn it promotes the song and the artist or band performing it. All we have to do is go online and do a quick search and we’ve discovered a new band. The latest song that I looked up was from a recent Heineken commercial and it turned out to be a band I’d never heard of called The Asteroids Galaxy Tour with the song “Golden Age”:
Do Not Pay A Publisher For Re-recording!
I recently recieved an email from a songwriter who had been offered a “contract” with a publisher. Part of that contract required her to pay for a re-recording of her song.
If a so-called publisher wants you to give them money for ANYTHING, run the other way! This is not standard practise. A publisher who is interested in your song will send you a single song contract that will give them permission to take your song and pitch it to artists or bands for a period of time. There should be a reversion clause that essentially gives you all of the rights back after a period of time if the song has not been successfully signed to anyone. And that’s it!
There are people out there who want to take advantage of newer songwriters who don’t know any better. Songwriters are flattered when they get a contract of any kind, and often don’t know how it’s supposed to work, so they’ll go ahead and pay for the “re-recording” thinking that this gives them a better chance to have the song picked up. It’s all baloney.
Five Deadly Songwriter Sins
No matter how many times the same points are brought up when it comes to common problems that arise for newer songwriters, they bear repeating as a kind of checklist to go through once you feel you’ve finished a song and you want to send it out there. Of course, a song can never really feel “finished” if you’re the type who likes to tweak a lot, but what I’m going to list here are more obvious problems that come up again and again when I’m listening to newer songwriters.
- Image via Wikipedia
1. INTRO TOO LONG – I’ve seen this brought up by many songwriting instructors or critiques again and again, but somehow it doesn’t seem to sink in for many writers. If you are pitching your songs to publishers or artists, you are going to lose them so quickly if your intro is long and self-indulgent. They want to get to the meat of it, so don’t serve so much salad! Keep your intro as short as you can, and you can even try no intro at all! Now of course, you’re going to find lots of examples of pro recordings out there with long intros, but these are often by artists or bands who have long since established some kind of following and they can get away with it. You can’t.
2. FILLER LYRICS – Even if you have one really good hook in your song, don’t ignore the rest of it! The sound of boring old phrases will put even the most enthusiastic of your listeners right to sleep. Your job is to take every one of those old, boring lines and make them remarkable. There is not one syllable’s worth of room for boring! Don’t get lazy or impatient, keep going over every line and make it better.
3. UNREMARKABLE MELODIES – in some cases the problem can be one of two things: either the melody is too repetitive, or it’s not repetitive enough! Work on your melodic phrasing, listen to popular songs or songs you like and notice how often the same melody is repeated within a verse and then within a chorus. The human brain can remember a sequence of up to 7 digits easily, then it starts to lose track. This is not to say you should only put 7 notes in your melodic phrasing, but just keep in mind that people who are listening to your songs fresh can only remember and retain so much. On the flip side if you keep throwing the same melody at them over and over, they’ll drift off to sleep. Too much or lack of repetition is probably the most common problem I hear in songwriter’s melodies.
4. POOR PERFORMANCE – if you’re not a singer, don’t sing on your own demos. For the purpose of getting a demo made, of course you’ll probably need to give them a rough version of the melody. The same goes for your accompaniment. If you can’t play very well, get somebody else to do it. A poor performance of even a great song will often be a distraction for those who are listening with a critical ear. Your mom will love it, your publisher won’t :-).
5. LACK OF A THEME AND CONTINUITY – what is your song about? If you can’t tell me in one phrase, then you haven’t got the chorus down yet. And don’t tell me it’s a love song, that’s going to lose me too! There are a gazillion love songs out there, what makes yours different? Then look at the continuity of your lyrics, is the first verse tied to the next one? Can you describe the “story” as it unfolds in each verse and does it make sense as a whole? A common problem is disjointed lyrics where one part of a song doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the next part and it’s difficult to really know what the song is about. It’s like walking into an extremely cluttered living room, where your eyes don’t know what to look at first. In a song with no continuity, your ears can’t figure out what to listen to either. Get rid of all the furniture and pictures, pare it down and start again!
The above problems are not insurmountable, and yet they will stand out immediately to someone who is used to listening to a lot of songs, like a publisher. You don’t want to give anyone the excuse to hit stop too soon! Take your time to fix them and it will pay off, I promise :-).
Happy 2011!
IJ
Related articles
- Diane Warren – The Queen of Hit Songwriting (kingsofar.com)
- So You Want My Job: Songwriter (artofmanliness.com)
- Stephin Merritt: Great songwriter, lousy interview (theglobeandmail.com)
Hit Songwriting Secrets (not!)
I spend a lot of time perusing the internet for other songwriting news, tips, ideas, etc., in part for my own curiosity, and also because of the articles I write for Muse’s Muse and those I post here.
One phrase that always makes me laugh is “songwriting secrets”…whether they are pitching a book or some kind of one-on-one session with you as a songwriter, or maybe they’re just trying to get you to sign up to their website so that they have your email address so they can spam with you with stuff later on; the idea that there are secrets to songwriting that no one else knows is FALSE!
Why? Because the songs that are successful are not secrets at all! They are out there on the radio, on iTunes, on videos and CDs for you to listen to, analyze, reverse engineer and learn from. If your ambition is to write a hit song, you have literally hundreds of thousands of hit songs out there at your disposal to teach you, they are not secret at all.
So how do you learn from them? This is the the real “secret”. What is it about a song that makes it successful? Studying different hit songs, what they are comprised of and how every part works together, you will get a better sense of what makes it successful.
So let’s get to the songwriting first. Some will tell you that there’s a secret “formula” to hit songwriting…for instance, always have a particular number of verses, always keep the intro short, always write in the first person, come up with a title first…etc., etc. Don’t “always” do anything; each song has its own personality and if you’ve already written a few of them, you know what I mean. Do you use the same chords every time? The same form or subject matter? Of course not. The only formula you need is to make it good, and “good” is a very subjective thing. If you listen to the top ten pop hits right now on Billboard, (or country, or any other chart for that matter) you’ll discover a few things.
They don’t necessarily conform to any one key or song form (although as far as subject matter, when I checked Billboard for the most recent top 10 pop hits they were pretty much all about love/lust or breakups/relationships!), but they do use certain techniques to keep the listener hanging on. Sometimes those elements are simply the recording and production itself, sometimes they are the way the verses and chorus (and/or pre-chorus) relate to each other, sometimes the lyrics and/or music are really catchy. And often it’s simply the artist or band that has such a huge following, almost anything they do will become a hit. If your ambition is to write a hit song, then your job is to study what’s out there and come up with something better! Easier said than done, I know.
But lets back off the actually writing for a bit and consider what else makes a song a hit. First of all, many songs that you hear are not necessarily “great”, but they make it to the charts because of the artist or band, as I mentioned earlier. If these artists and bands don’t write their own material, who does? A lot of them get their songs from their record label, who may have their own writers or have a publishing branch. Quite often, the same circle of songwriters write a lot of the songs you hear…particularly in country and pop. You can find out yourself by checking out the BMI or ASCAP records (or whichever performing rights organization exists in your country). These P.R.O.’s have search able records online, so there’s no secret there either.
So, okay, a lot of it is who you know, in which case, part of your job as a potential hit songwriter, after you’ve come up with some great songs, is getting to know people. Go to music centres like Nashville or Los Angeles or New York, research publishers who might be interested in your style of writing. Join organizations that can help you like N.S.A.I. or songwriting associations that give workshops in all areas of the craft and business. Be prepared to keep learning, learning, learning. Hang on to your day job and save money for these ventures. When you meet people who can help you, be polite, don’t shove your CD in their pocket, ASK first.
You also need to be patient. I met a guy once who wrote his first ten songs and immediately went to Nashville to pitch them. He was so sure that’s all he had to do…but when he got there he learned pretty quickly that he had spent nowhere near enough time on the writing part before he did the pitching part. It was a huge reality check. That’s a true story. So remember to use your head and do everything in the right order!
The recent stories about Taylor Swift’s success are interesting because on her earlier releases she co-wrote a lot of material, but on her most recent release “Speak Now” she wrote every single song herself. She’s young and she’s smart, getting the experience she needed under her belt first by co-writing. Co-writing is a “given” in the pro songwriting community…a lot of the songs you hear are written by more than one person, so you should consider doing that yourself too. Chances are that if you get anywhere near working for a record label, you’ll be thrown into situations where you’ll have to write with someone you don’t know. And if you’re a singer/songwriter and hoping to make it as an artist, you might take a cue from Taylor. Don’t assume you know everything…you don’t!
There are no secrets to hit songwriting any more than there are secrets to any kind of success. It comes down to the same things, whether you want to be a great chef, a successful financier or a best-selling author: hard work, determination, patience, some talent and a little luck. Shhhh…don’t tell anybody! 🙂
IJ
- Teaching the Unteachable… Notes on Songwriting (teachstreet.com)
- “If I Was Justin Bieber” (prweb.com)
- On The Download: Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ (omg.yahoo.com)
