Make your own song

It is very important to know what are the songs in your catalog are hits. This is vital for commercial songwriting success. The difficulty is we do not know how to measure the songs hit potential. Until music technology evolves and there are pioneers in this technology attempting to measure the song potential and give a quantitative measurement if the song is a hit or a crap.
They call this “HIT SONG SCIENCE“, and the tool can give assessments quantitatively if the song can be a hit. They do it by comparing the qualities of the million dollar released hits. The official website for this (you can try to avail their services, it was free before) is www.hitsongscience.com. I have tried their services last year it was great, it was free that time and I hurriedly upload my songs.

The overall measurement concept of this song is to rate it from 1 to 10. The ratings from 1 to 10 is a form of logarithmic scale, this means common songs tend to have a rating around 5 to 6 while a highly hit song can get a rating of at least 7. There is a big difference in quality from songs rated at 6 and 7 than with songs rated at 4 and 5.

The way they will measure it is by how close your songs to the previously released hit songs by comparing the tonal qualities of the song, the beat, the tempo, the frequency response and everything that can measured by an algorithm.

They find out that hit songs form “clusters”, they have similarities according to their study. So if your song belongs to the clusters, the higher rating you can get and the most likely your song will become a hit.

A sample song rating from hit song science looks like below:

In the hit song science analysis report, it shows the HSS (Hit song science rating). Based on the above report, the song is a hit potential because it has 7.15 rating. According to HSS, ratings over 7 are classified as high potential hits. Then there are what we called as “Proximity of hit songs” where it shows how close your song to the cluster of previously released hits. The closer the rating, the lower will be the affinity value. Precisely if your song is a confirmed hit and it is included in hit song science database, and you will upload the exact song for evaluation. It will give an affinity value of zero with that song. It is because the algorithm detects there are exactly the same, the hit song in their database and your uploaded song.

In real music business, hit songs are driven by marketing. So even though a song got a hit song rating, it still needs some marketing to succeed. According to hit song science, hit song rating are useful for music business decision makers to decide which songs needs less marketing budget. This is because, a certified hit song rating from their algorithm needs only a simple marketing plan to succeed. This not mean songs with rating below 7 is a failure, it can still succeed and could achieve “hit status” but it will need a very agressive marketing plan which needs a larger budget.

Remember this is only a rating and does not mean that you will rely solely on this. There are commercial success on the use of this hit song science algorithm. Remember Norah Jones,” Come away with me”, music executives use hit song science to determine the hit song potential of her album.

For me the best evaluation to detect which songs are hits are a combination of professional song review and this hit song science.

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Make your own song:Free Music Lessons and Songwriting Courses

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 1:55 am and is filed under Music Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.