The journey of a hit: from the artist’s head to your headphones

Creating a popular song is the successful marriage of opposites — the joining of talent, emotion, creativity and poetry with fickle and fleeting consumer tastes, tight purse-strings and the music industry.

Though thousands of musicians try, only a miniscule percentage of compositions ever become successful. Most artists never write a hit song, others work for decades to create a single one… one hit wonders such as “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor (1982), “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye (2011), or even Pachelbel’s Canon in D (around 1700). Yet the “hit” remains the common goal of the creator and consumer of music, as well as the industry that makes its living from it.

The battle for your eardrums

A hit song reaches millions of people on an emotional level. It sells millions of copies, is streamed or downloaded millions of times, and is played frequently on the radio, TV, films and ads. Artists receive life changing royalties and fame, and record labels earn millions in royalties. With such rich rewards, it is no wonder that the hit song is the holy grail of professional musicians. But it is a treacherous journey from an artists’ head to your headphones, and few songs survive the trip.

The anatomy of a hit

A hit song is one that pleases the ear of the masses. For this reason, most are written to deliver swift balm to shared emotional turmoils of human existence: love, heartbreak, death, coming of age, disillusionment, jealousy or friendship. In our age of short attention spans, the typical hit song is less than 180 seconds, and needs to “hook” the listener within fifteen seconds. It is the equivalent of an audio home-run.

Hits rarely fall out of the sky onto the back of an envelope, they are usually the result of a long evolution from idea to score, then writing and rewriting the lyrics and notes. Often it takes years to complete, sometimes only 10 minutes, as is claimed by REM for their greatest hit, “Losing My Religion”.

A hit must be catchy and compelling. It must establish a quick emotional connection with listeners and evoke an emotional response such as joy, laughter, sadness, reflection, nostalgia or simply tapping one’s feet. It then has to be in good hands; the right record label who can capture the perfect recording, then promote the song and make it heard by the mass market.

How does a record label find new potential hits?

It takes hard work, and lots of it — music production is serious business. Record labels invest huge resources into discovering new talent because it is the lifeblood of their industry. Finding new potential hit artists at the earliest point in their careers is crucial; talent must be spotted before the competition finds them, the earlier contracts can be negotiated the more lucrative the revenues, and artists have a very limited “shelf-life”; few recording artists remain in the charts for more than 3 years.

A talent scout’s search for new hit music is increasingly done from the desktop. Technology has allowed artists to self-publish on internet platforms such as iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, Youtube, Twitter, and the band’s own website. There are disadvantages, however; with virtually anyone able to publish music on the internet, the number of musicians and their compositions are drowning each other out. Finding the ones that will deliver future revenues has become worse than finding a needle in a haystack.

Popular music: a disposable commodity?

Listening to music was once an audio journey consisting of a collection of songs played from start to finish on an elaborately decorated album from a listener’s carefully curated collection. Technology now allows single songs hosted on the internet to be digitally excised to playlists and consumed individually and out of context with the rest of an album’s songs. Music is sliced up into smaller units with shorter length and life-cycles, and delivered over a multitude of digital media at diminishing cost to consumers with ever-decreasing attention spans. Songs which don’t satisfy at the moment are quickly skipped over, or deleted from the playlist.

Often consumers are not actively selecting new music, preferring to let playlist algorithms line up “recommended songs” based on past “likes”. Technology has seated consumers at an all-you-can eat buffet where any song in any order can be consumed anywhere, and the task of finding new music is increasingly relegated to robots.

Finding the pain points in the music industry

Numerous pain points exist during the long journey of a hit song from artists to consumers, and they hurt everyone:

Music composers and performing artists:

○ Need a better way to have their music discovered by record labels and publishing houses.

○ Require a system that ensures that their recording contracts can be enforced to sustain their career long after their most lucrative music has been released.

○ Want to know their audience’s listening habits, location and demographics.

○ Need assurance that record labels are carrying out their side of the promotion contract.

Record labels and music publishers:

○ Want an easier way to discover the new talent that is the lifeblood of their business among a sea of aspiring artists.

○ Require market situational overview about where and how often songs are being consumed, by what demographic, and whether a public broadcast was licensed or not.

○ Need a better way to track and record music metadata such as copyrights and ownership information to facilitate the accurate accounting and distribution of royalties.

○ Want to minimize the copyright administrative overhead that eats into the revenues without directly contributing to the creative output.

Consumers:

○ Want a better way to participate in the music production business both in the form of finding the music they want, and supporting artists who create the music they love.

○ Would like a simple, transparent way to participate in music business revenues that is currently achieving a fraction of its market potential.

○ Crave more and better music!

Re-engineering the music business

As the music industry digitises and matures, the need for increased transparency is becoming a globally recognized issue, acknowledged by artists and the music industry. A central problem is the complex web of copyright, royalty and distribution rights which are managed by multiple and poorly coordinated players, each prioritizing their own financial interests first. Add the monumental task of keeping track of where millions of digital copies of music are downloaded, streamed, sold or broadcast and the potential for lost or misattributed royalties is huge. This is the state of the music industry today.

At Utopia Genesis Foundation we recognize the notorious intransparency of the music industry. This can be solved by migrating music consumption records to a publicly accessible blockchain where data is not owned or controlled by any one party. Our blockchain-hosted platform, the Utopia Open Platform (UOP), encapsulates, tracks and records metadata associated with a song, e.g. copyrights, ownership, band or artist’s name, composer’s identity, genre, etc.

Combined with a globally distributed system which monitors publicly broadcast music over radio, TV, social media and venues, a new era of technological and artistic innovation is arriving; our goal is to recoup the missing half of total potential music industry revenues, allowing the money to be fed back into the music creation process where it rightfully belongs; with the artists, composers and producers who improve the lives of every individual who enjoys music. This is possible with the tokenization.

Curious to know more? Join our Discord or Telegram Group — Utopia Genesis.