How was the song written?

When I’m on conferences around the world this is the headline I really hate “How was the song written”. In these panels they pick out the songwriters of some famous song and ask them how they wrote the song.

The problem is that yes they wrote the damn song in the same way everybody else write songs. They sat down or send files to each other.  That’s it. Usually it’s not much of a story about it. Yes they are good on writing hooks in songs. But really can you discuss how you do that? No I guess not.

And every time you are on these panels it’s the same. They sit up there and actually have nothing to contribute. And then someone ask a question how did the song get big? And they don’t have a clue around that one. That is actually the interesting part. I mean all the people in the audience want to know how to get their song as big as they got theirs. Often in these situations though they don’t know.

Because they just sold the song to a label with an artist. And the success of this song is because the PR team around that artist was the ones who made it a hit. And that story they don’t have, if you lucky they might have some fragments around it.

The answer is that yes we have a good publishing team with good relations to labels with a lot of money to put on their artists. That is not so sexy answer, but hey it’s the truth. Well then all will ask how we get in touch with these good people? That question they don’t want to answer.  I mean they don’t want to be bumped off the golden goose by someone else.

The interesting part is that you should bring down the PR team around the song, but that never happens. I guess these are the people that are hard to find. They don’t stand with the names under the song, but in most cases they actually did more work than the writer and artists together. It’s rare through they are shown on panels. Then also they can be quite many in each team.