The Fallacy That Is A Hit Song

One of the things we do here on Fame Games is try to find a "hit song" among all the independent material submitted to us, and then push that along to our contacts in the industry, in the hope that some of our artists will be rewarded with lucrative deals! Wouldn't that be a perfect proof of concept for Fame Games! (We're now beginning now to slowly fulfill that dream...)

And yet, none of us support those cheesy manufactured "hits" written with only one goal in mind: to make money on a musical format for as long as possible.

We come from varied musical backgrounds. Even though some of us have been quite involved with some very successful artists, producers and managements where having "hits" was certainly never spat on, we are quite unanimous in our agreement that the creation of music must be organically driven and "real" and that contriving your arrangements against your instincts only so that they might have a chance of becoming "commercial hits" is a path of self-destruction - and it harms the public ears!

But we're also open to the reality of life. For an artist to be able to sustain themselves from their art, they need at least a degree of recognition. And this, quite often, means that their music must have "credibility." It must be well executed, it must deliver its message in the best possible way for the target audience it is aimed at, and... it must be a "hit" if it is to get the artist noticed. And for us, to have credibility as an A&R platform we must prove that we can indeed find the "best of the best." And only then will our artists truly stand to benefit from those efforts.

The way we think of a "hit" is a song which "hits you over the head" and makes you remember the particular artist. If you produce, listen to and "consume" music for a living, and in the quantities that we do, you soon develop a sense of what "connects" and what doesn't. Erm... except that we don't always agree. (Which is why we've spent years fine-tuning a system which is supposed to help us in making those decisions...)

When we recognized how futile it is to look for a "hit" song, we dropped that word from our vocabulary for quite a while, until... we got picked up by a major radio network whose affiliates didn't want to play unknown music! For them it's not enough that a song is "good." It's got to be a hit already. No, not "a potential" hit. A bona fide hit.

You can't believe the struggle it was for us to convince our reluctant affiliates that radio CAN help DISCOVER future hits (like it used to). We're still fighting this battle. As we reconize that giving our artists maximum exposure can only be helpful to the vast majority of them, we also recognize that we must meet our affiliates (and especially the undecided affiliates) half-way.

So we started using the slogan "Looking for the next big radio hit!"

What do you think? Does this work? What would you do differently, if anything?

Don't forget to check out my other blog "Write A Song About This!"