Science Reveals Secret Formula For Making Your Song A Big Hit: Listen up, all you aspiring pop stars. If you want your songs to be big hits, get yourself some back-up singers. Researchers at the University of Southern California came up with that little nugget of advice after analyzing 2,480 songs that made the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and 2012. The researchers compared hit singles pegged at #1 to songs that failed to climb above #90 on the chart, noting the kinds of instruments and vocals used in each song.
Most of the #1 songs had backup vocals – including Prince’s 1986 hit “Kiss” and Jay Z’s “Hey Papi” (2000). Low-ranked songs generally didn’t.
The researchers also found a link between the number of instruments in a song and its chances for pop success.
“Our results suggest songs that do not follow conventional instrumentation have the best chance of becoming No. 1 hits,” Joseph Nunes, professor of marketing at the the university’s Marshall School of Business, said in a written statement. “The average song has three to five instruments, but songs that feature a surprisingly low or high number of instruments — at specific points in time — tended to stand out.”
Hits that fared relatively poorly on the chart – like Aretha Franklin’s “Try a Little Tenderness” (1962) and Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (1986) – tended to feature certain combinations of instruments:
• acoustic guitar, acoustic piano and no strings
• clean guitar and acoustic piano
• bass guitar, synthesizer and no electric piano
So if you’re looking for that invitation to the Grammies, better get your bandmates on board.
The Huffington Post | By Macrina Cooper-White
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/01/science-pop-song-hit_n_5912902.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share
[Thanks to David Barber for contributing this article!]
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MUSIC BUSINESS 101: SCHOOLS WHERE YOU CAN LEARN ABOUT THE INDUSTRY
A growing number of colleges, universities and other educational institutions are giving students the opportunity to learn about the music business with hands-on experience and classes taught by teachers from the industry. And those schools are increasingly responding to the changes shaping both education and the music business. For a report on Music Business Education in our Sept 27 issue, Billboard surveyed a sample of these schools. We’ve featured CU first, then the rest are arranged in alphabetical order. [This article has been truncated. Please check it out online for more info about each featured school.]
The University of Colorado Denver (Denver, CO)
The university features a music and entertainment industry studies department that includes courses in concert promotion, music publishing and music business in the digital age, as well as a student-run label, CAM Records. The school offers one of the few singer-songwriter programs in the country. Students collaborate across all programs, creating a real-world experience of the music industry while in school, and building a supportive community of musicians, managers, and engineers.
CU Denver communication program director Cynthia Barringer notes some of the concerns within the music business education community including: the absence of music education in K to 12th grade schools, the need to increase musical literacy, the cost of music technology, and the importance of offering more courses in aspects of the music business including business, law, finance and economics.
This article first appeared in the Sept. 30th issue of Billboard.
By Thom Duffy and Cathy Applefeld Olson
http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6259155/top-music-business-schools-colleges-programs
[Thanks to Storm Gloor, a prof at CU Denver, for passing this article along!]
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TAYLOR SWIFT UNVEILS SYNTH-HEAVY NEW TRACK ‘OUT OF THE WOODS’
At the strike of midnight on Tuesday, Taylor Swift delivered a gift to all the fans that pre-ordered the singer’s upcoming “straight-up pop” album 1989: A synthesizer-heavy new track titled “Out of the Woods.” The track was co-written with fun. and Bleachers rocker Jack Antonoff, and “Out of the Woods” shares many of the same musical characteristics of uplifting fun. tracks like “We Are Young” and “Carry On.” Max Martin also helped produce Swift’s vocal performance on the track.
By Swift’s own account, “Out of the Woods” will probably not be officially released as a single, but Swift tells USA Today that she wanted to share this track early because “I think it’s the greatest example of the sound of this album.” While Swift warned fans that 1989 would represent a new phase in her career, they likely didn’t expect something that sounds so electronic. “I used a Yamaha DX7 a lot on that song, which is so uniquely Eighties, but then countered it with a super-distorted Minimoog Voyager in the chorus,” Antonoff told USA Today about the track. “That sounds extremely modern to me. It’s that back-and-forth.”
The song is reportedly about Swift’s relationship with One Direction’s Harry Styles, and though she wouldn’t confirm the track was directly inspired by her time with Styles in her Rolling Stone cover story, she details a romance in which “every day was a struggle. Forget making plans for life – we were just trying to make it to next week.”
Swift also hinted that the “Out of the Woods” lyric “Remember when you hit the brakes too soon/Twenty stitches in a hospital room” was inspired by a real, top-secret incident where her and an ex were involved in a serious snowmobile accident that resulted in a hospital visit. While no record of the incident ever appeared in the tabloids, Swift insists that it happened. “You know what I’ve found works even better than an NDA?” said the singer. “Looking someone in the eye and saying, ‘Please don’t tell anyone about this.'”
“Out of the Woods” became available for download on iTunes soon after fans who preordered 1989 received the track, where it immediately shot to Number One on the songs chart, New York Times reports. The Times also notes that “Shake It Off” also ascended to Number One on the Billboard pop charts despite a cold-shouldering from country music radio stations. If country stations weren’t down with “Shake It Off,” they’re really going to have a hard time with “Out of the Woods.” 1989 is out on October 27th.
By Daniel Kreps | Rolling Stone