Creating Long Song Intro Puts you in Trouble Today
Remember the song “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin? This song was released in 1970’s and the length of song intro is around 50 seconds. It was a very wonderful song with good melody, instrumentation and meaning. It was one of the most favorite rock songs ever written. The song intro is amazing, the acoustic guitar sounds so classical, unique and peaceful. But that was yesterday. Today, creating long intro puts you in trouble. Why?
It is because it is getting harder to sell a song in the radio and everywhere. The biggest selling point of any song today is the hook and lyrics and not anymore so much of musical instrumentation. It is getting harder because radio is cutting off playing minutes for songs and to save more time in advertisements. Advertisements is getting more in demand due to increasing market competition anywhere. Therefore if you’re a songwriter that is fun of making long song intro, you’re song intro will be either be:
a. Not accepted for commercial recording and release because of too much instrumentation.
b. Will be accepted but the song intro will be truncated.
I have heard rumors that commercial radio is increasing the song tempo to shorten the number of minutes of playing time. This receives a lot of negative feedback from recording labels that there songs are not of full potential when being promoted in the air. You will not notice it when you hear it, but increasing the song tempo by a fraction can save a lot of minutes in the 24 hours FM operation. This minutes save will be used for advertisements which is the number one source of income for commercial radio.
As a producer I kept the intro short, typically within 10 to 20 seconds. Even 20 seconds seems to long today. Some songwriters implement great strategies to sell the song right away to any listers but structuring the song very well. This includes:
a. Keeping the intro very short (not more than 20 seconds)
b. Chorus or hook is played right away, enabling everyone to pickup attention.
Also this problem of creating long intro is affecting pop music too much more than any genre. It is ok to create long intro in jazz and it seems normal. The reason is that Jazz songs focuses more on instrumentation more than the singer image. It is exactly different in pop music. You need to impress listeners right away because of too much competition everywhere. Not only listeners but to enable radio station to accept your song. It seems that they hate accepting songs with long intro, they get bored very easily.
Musically of any song is less important today than it was yesterday, in the 70’s and 80’s where this was given tremendous importance. The instruments and melodies of the song before is the top priority of accepting any kind of demo. And creating very long song instrumentation intro is normal like “Hotel California” by Eagles. Now things are exactly different, there is such thing as “Image” hurting the artistic musically of any song. Music video is more of image, but I am conservative musician. As long as the intro is short and the song is good, I do not care with the artist whether attractive or not.
The song itself is what makes it more important than everything, who cares how many artist already sings “Happy Birthday” or “Yesterday” by Beatles. There are mixtures of ugly and attractive singers. I know that. But the song last for a long time, it is because of craftsmanship and great meaning. This is a good objective of any songwriting endeavor.
Also, the fault of a song with very long intro is not exactly the songwriter but the producer of the song. The job of the producer is to translate raw songwriting into professional recording. And in the professional recording process this is where the intro is created. This type of producer lost track in time. But pop music producers knows this very well and they know also that with songs that have intro of more than 20 seconds results to less commercial potential of the song.
This article is a warning to any songwriter doing their own demo at home. Careful when creating intro, make it short and simple. After all the one you would like to sell is not your intro but the song hook, melody and lyrics. Keep this in your mind always. A lot of songwriter also who at the same time are good guitarist falls into the trap of creating Van Halen type of intro today. Do not spend so much time with your guitar amp creating song intro, instead spend more time with your cassette recorder and create great song melodies and lyrics.Modern listeners do not anymore like to listen very long song intro.
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