Characteristics of a hit song?

[stickwolf]

Check out "The Manual" by the Timelords (available online if you search). They describe the formula for a one-time top hit. But that formula isn't purely psychoacoustic or musical. It's a business formula.

Fact is, "hits" aren't what everyone most wants to listen to, necessarily. In fact, billboard charts are based on tangible factors like singles sales, radio play and such. What about factors like how often people listen to something after they buy it?? And for how long a time in their lives do they keep listening?

Fact is, corporate executives can control what is a "hit." There IS a formula for how long the average attention span is, and for many, many other factors. But both hits and non-hits will have these characteristics. Simply take any song with all the characteristics of a hit and then it's up to the business circumstances whether it becomes a hit.

The initial question is absolute nonsense, because what if someone writes a song that could be a hit but never bothers to devote to promoting it? It won't be a hit. And so no formula that applies only to hits could ever exist.

But for anyone that hasn't read it yet, "The Manual" is required music biz reading. Here's a link: http://www.klf.de/online/books/bytheklf/manual.htm

[Frodo]

Musical taste has nothing to do with "hit songs". There have been terrible "hits" and there have been wonderful non hits.

If by "hit" we're talking about a money making song, then controversy seems to be the #1 element of the day. What goes on the CD cover plays a big part, even though that has little to do with the song itself.

Mainly, it's about money. There are people who can make or break a song's chances of getting aired-- and these people have their prices. A lot of under-the-table money changes hands for this purpose.

Two important exceptions: Nirvana and Prince. In both cases, record companies "predicted" that they would never sell. Enter the independent labels and the internet where reaching listeners meant bypassing the fat cats. Eventually, the system they bucked had to buck to them. It wasn't about artistic taste, it was about eating crow.

Everyone has their price, and that price is rising exponentially.

Oh-- one other note: Capitol Records refused the Beatles because they believed their music was not marketable. Vee-Jay released the first Beatle single in the States, and when it was a hit, Capitol sued Vee-Jay and put them out of business.

Now, what was that about a hit song?

[funkyfreddy]

This whole debate sets off my BS detector BIG TIME!

1. First off, if these companies can accurately predict hits why aren't they making them? There are lots of talented musicians who would be glad to do the work......... and are so desperate they would do it for a song

2. The music business is a machine, the TV business is a machine, the film industry is a machine, etc, and nowadays 2 out of 3 are needed to promote a hit..... a hit record doesn't come out of a vacuum, it takes a lot of work to get something out there to the general public, a lot of money has to change hands nowadays for this sort of thing to happen!

3. Let's examine some of the hits of the 60's.....
how about a novelty song like the "Theme From the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" - yes, that was a big hit in the late 60's! So was the theme from "Deliverance" and "The ballad of Bonnie and Clyde"..... could or would any of those be a hit today? No way, so there goes your argument!

4. What about Beethoven's 5th, Stravinsky's "the Rite Of Spring", Miles Davis "Kind of Blue", Dave Brubeck's "Take 5", etc. Could they be hits today? No way! Stylistically they're out of date, people's attention spans are much shorter than they were in the past, and nowadays a lot of hit records are made by non-musicians......

5. I think a hit record is very much a child of it's time..... a notion/idea/melody/groove packaged in a way that hits the wind at just the right moment and captures the masses attention...... there have been many times corporations have used their TV/radio stations to manufacture hits and have failed miserably....... now if they (Time Warner, Sony, Clear Channel) can't predict a hit with their billions of resources what makes you think anyone else can? Kind of reminds of the P.T. Barnum saying "There's a sucker born every minute!"

[paradeatw]

I'm going to go out on a limb here, especially since i haven't written a "hit" yet...

my psych theory:

PEOPLE ARE SELFISH:

1 - The song needs to either extend the moment that people want to be part of

or

2 - Forget the moment that people wish not to be part of

and

3 - The song needs to sound familiar to something they have already experienced in life before ie the song can be completey new and different musically as long as it reminds them of the smell of their childhood bedroom... get it? Familiarity breeds safety breeds welcomed breeds allocated time to listen breeds word of mouth breeds into the masses

[paradeatw]

There's a company in Spain that claims to be able to pedict a hit.
http://www.hitsongscience.com/

haha... well, it's like market research right? im sure there are variables and controls... but, of course - anything can go gret or wrong in the "real world" but i'll admit... ill give it a try for $50! ahhahaha

i'll write a song, give my own honest opinion about it and then send it in and see how far off i am... would be just fun to see how the whole process works...

[NinjaShredder]

the goal is to find the characteristics that make up a "hit" song. These MUST NOT be present in non-hit songs (flops) and MUST be present in ALL hit songs.

Being careful about what is being discussed here..

The combination of requirements:
1 - "characteristics MUST NOT be present in non-hit songs", and,
2 - "characteristics are defined psycho-acoustically"
are illogical as one could write and record a song which fulfills any collection of psyco-acoustic characteristics, but not promote it enough for it to be a hit.

Instead (1) should be interpreted as, "characteristics MUST NOT be present in flops", where a "flop" is defined as a song that WAS promoted well, yet didn't sell well.

I think that it is interesting to consider what characteristics are in a large proportion of hit songs, and may-or-may-not be in non hit songs. Music like that by McFly feels like it has been consciously written and produced based on some rules and patterns derived from past hits.

[Resonant Alien]

How would this theory take into account the social context of when a song was a hit. I think someone else touched on this, but (usually) a song is only a "hit" within a certain time period/social context. Case in point: "Sugar Sugar" is mentioned as one of these songs. It's a catchy tune, and it was a hit in the 70s, but seriously, I don't think I would be going out on a limb if I said that song would flop miserably if it were released today (unless maybe it were "marketed" as a children's song). Same could be said for countless other "hit" songs - they could only have been hits at the specific point in time they were released. I do not see how you can possibly model that to the point of predicting anything.

Another case in point also previously mentioned - Nirvana. NOBODY saw that one coming - not even Kurt Cobain himself. But virtually overnight, Nirvana destroyed every melody-savvy hair band that topped the charts for the previous 8 years. Had Nirvana released "Nevermind" in 1985 instead of 1991, they probably would have never been the rock gods they bacame.

The other thing that can make a song a hit or not is the production - both style and quality. As one example, take a good song, record it with a rock band and a rock singer. Take the same song but record it with a country band and a country singer. One becomes a hit and one flops. Same song, different delivery and different audience. In that kind of scenario (which has happened), the "hit" factor is not determined by the song itself, but by everything else surrounding the song.

Besides, DP has a menu item called "Record Hits" - what more do you need?

[MrVideo]

It's like the "chants" of olden cultures to get people "in line". Proven to use music to control the behaviors of people. Monotonic chants or literally repeating the same phrases, lulls people into a sort of semi-conscience state. "Every Thing is Beautiful"

Sorry, but what you are hearing is not really music, but rather mind control.

[David Polich]

Every so often someone comes out with this "characteristics of a hit" crap.

Gotta love the comment about that 1khz "doesn't pass". What the hell does that mean?

Or that "you" in the lyric doesn't "pass". Doesn't even make sense.

Anybody making a claim that a hit song can be calculated by observing a set number of factors is not a musician - period. No musician would ever make a claim like that - at least not seriously.

There are common-sense methods of producing music that "sounds like a hit" - we all are pretty much aware of that. One technique is to take an existing hit and twist the chords, melody, rhythm and arrangement around "just enough" to disguise it. Hip-hop is currently rife with this kind of thing. Nothing beats taking "Push It" and reworking it a bit with different lyrics and a slightly different groove and snare sound (or handclaps or fingersnaps instead of the snare).

Every genre has its periods of movement and imitation. A few landmark "new" tracks in a genre, then the clones inevitably follow, sometimes for a few years. How many of us thought the Creed song "Higher" was actually a Pearl Jam record the first time we heard it? Didn't matter to Creed, they took that to the bank. Now it seems every band on FuseTV is recycling old Green Day or Linkin Park stuff.

If you do any kind of producing for awhile, you collect a lot of data about what makes a song feel like it will be commercially viable. It's a list that grows every year you do production, and it gets pretty long. But you can usually sense whether something has that "commercial" feeling. It gets to be where it's instinctual. You don't even have to verbalize or analyze it - you just know.

The shite on Paris Hilton's CD is all mediocre - but it does have enough of the "required" production values to guarantee that the only thing now needed is the megabuck promotion machine which is behind it. We as artists get the last laugh though - you'll see that CD in the Used bins two months from now. Not even her record company would seriously consider her an artist, except in meetings with her or her reps. I'm betting that her label's president will let it slip that she's a joke if he gets drunk enough at the office Christmas party.

Anyway, no need to worry about "prediction formulas" for hit songs. I've been hearing about them for at least 25 years.

[Gone To Lunch]

The 'hitness' of a piece of music is at least as much a function of its commercial milieu, label, promotional budget, artist profile etc, as of its musical features. Correlations are not causes. These types of statistical programs arouse the fetish of the accountant, rather than make musical or aesthetically meaningful statements. The musical features themselves are post hoc analytical abstractions themselves anyway. Music simply is, even though it may be possible to offer retrospective statistical descriptions of what has been chosen for promotion by non-musical criteria....