I find the study of popular songs fascinating. I don’t generally write in a pop music style for pleasure but I enjoy examining popular songs from a song writing perspective to try and better understand what makes them popular.
A few years ago I spent a good number of weekends making old school spreadsheets of the attributes of hit songs and some of their commonalities. There are far more advanced tools for examining hit songs using AI but they approach it from the perspective of the finished song rather than the song writing aspect.
One of the tricky things with hit songs is the non-musical factors that make a song popular. I remember a story in “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg about Outkast’s song “Hey Ya”. The song had been greenlighted by everyone including advanced computer models that said it had all the ingredients of a hit. However, it took a whole lot of clever moves to get the song accepted as a top 40 hit.
In the same way, the relatively obscure Australian artist Goyte with the less than straightforward art pop hit “Somebody That I Used To Know” broke through and became the number one Billboard hit of 2012. There were many reasons for this but the song being used in Glee and then American Idol one day apart surely helped to propel it to hit song status.
So why are older one hit wonders worth studying?
Because whilst they had promotion, label backing and had their “break”, the mediums were more straightforward and music focussed. Pre internet, radio was the medium that broke songs and even though payola was a part of the industry, the music still had to have the goods.
The Takeaway: I once listened to 5 hours of one hit wonders straight. It was actually a lot more pleasurable than you would imagine BUT it taught me a lot about what made those hit songs. If you’re interested in studying song writing in popular music, even just for fun, listening to older radio-driven one hit wonders and see what you discover about them.
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