Want to write a hit song? What are your peeps listening to?

Some great advoce I picked up somewhere was that if you want to write a hit song, you need to know what people are listening to. Whilst its true that there are song pluggers and the radio is very much influenced by the record companies, the fact is that if he radio are regularly playing songs, whether it is because they have an incentive or for any other reason, the net result is people listen to them.

I think it was Jimmy Webb at the S3 conference who said that if you listen to a song at least 5 times, it will grow on you and you will start to like it. This is a formula that they use to get you to buy or follow a track. The lyrics become familiar, the hook becomes entrenched in your mind and if it is pleasing to you, you may well find yourself singing along.

Hit’s are here the money is in songwriting. If you write a hit song, you will be well remunerated and also you will become noticed and in demand by artists and their team, looking for a new song, hoping that you weren’t a one hit wonder.

So is there a magical secret? Magical no, but the key thing is knowing what people like, what are they listening to today. It’s easy to find a market for your songs in today’s world with so many internet vehicles like MySpace, FaceBook, iTunes, Music Forte and hundreds if not thousands of others. But these are less likely to get you a hit for music’s sake, than the radio, which isn’t going away anywhere fast. Radio plays mainstream and mainstream is what it means, i.e. what most people are listening to today.

So in my humble opinion, if you want to write a hit song, rather than (as Ralph Murphy says) be a self indulgent songwriter, writing songs to play in bars after 10 P.M. when people are drunk or t least merry and mostly don’t care, you need to write something different. Something uplifting, which is often very different to what the average songwriter puts together. Murphy says that the hits are the songs that people listen to on the way to work in the morning when they want a lift.

So the first thing to do is to find out what they are listening to. I live in New Zealand, so if I want to write a hit song for the local market, I would go to RIANZ. “The Recording Industry Association of New Zealand Inc (RIANZ) is a non-profit organisation representing major and independent record producers, distributors and recording artists throughout New Zealand.”

RIANZ publishes the weekly New Zealand Top 40 Singles Chart. “The Top 40 Singles Chart is compiled based on a 75:25 split between physical / digital singles sales figures and radio play information gathered by radio data collection agency Radioscope.”They also publish a number of other charts including the Top 10 Radio Airplay Chart.

Like all charts they show the position this week, last week and weeks on the chart. A quick look through these will tell you what is popular in your local world. These charts are a mixture of everything, local and international. To give you an idea, the Top 40 as at Monday 28 July included 5 local acts and Number One on the chart was Phil Collins, In The Air Tonight which this time has been on the NZ charts for 21 weeks! Always on My Mind by Tiki Taane is number 3 still and has been on the charts for 14 weeks.

In my opinion, Always On My Mind is very much a polynesian sound and will be hugely popular locally with our youth and with a reggae flavour has some legs internationally, but I can’t see it being on the charts at Billboard, the other place I look to see what is popular, especially on the Country Charts because Country Music has a huge following in the USA, my major songwriting target market.

So now you know what people are listening to on the radio and what they are buying. What do you do next? Subscibe to my blog and I will tell you more, this isn’t a book after all lol.

If you think this blog is helpful, tell a friend. If you want to hear some of my songs, check out my MySpace page. Oh and please do leave a comment. Is my blog intesting? Is it helpful? Are there things you would like me to write about?

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

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Watch Me Daddy – My latest song

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you will know that I upload Songwriting Tips on my tweets and am now over 250.

So one of the tips, which seems obvious. but isn’t always, is Write About What You Know.

Another one is to pick a song from the repertoire of someone who’s music you like, or who is very successful and try to emulate it. So I combined those 2 concepts and came up with Watch Me Daddy which you can hear on my MusicForte page as of this morning.

First I looked at the Billboard Country Music Top Country Chart about a month ago and number one was Trace Adkins with You’re Gonna Miss This, which was a great song.

I then looked at the structure, the topic and added what I know.

Watch Me Daddy is about my daughter and your daughter and every girl’s father. Throughout their childhood they want to share what they are learning and what they can do and in the lead break you can hear my daughter aged around 3 saying Watch this Dad.

The situation doesn’t really change and they always want you to be proud of them and watch what they get up to, which is part of that special relationship that girls have with their Dad’s.

Earlier this year I had the privlege to not only walk my daughter down the aisle, but she sang beautifully to the accompaniment of my guitar as we walked down the aisle together. It was a Shania Twain song, not one of mine, but it was an awesome experience. It was all that either of us could do to not cry and I avoided eye cntact with the assembled family and friends so as not to lose the plot. There wasn’t a dry eye in the assembledge.

So what I did was to write a song that was both for her and for all fathers and daughters. Another tip from my tweets is write in such a way as to have people think I wrote it for them. That everyone can relate to. I think in this song I have achieve that for a great many people. Now all I need to do is to get a professional singer to add it to his repertoire and I can move on to the next song which is hitting paper.

If you’d like to hear this song, you can find it at MusicForte along with other songs. Please have a listen and if you like it, tell someone, especially if you know an artist that can do it justice, or an A&R person:)

I gave away my little girl today

You’re going to change your name

With tears of pride I walked you down the aisle and you said

Watch Me Daddy one more time, and I love you

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)