Five Ways to Make Listeners Return to Your Music

Here are five easy ways to increase the likelihood that you’ll build a fan-base for your music.

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Is there a difference between good music and successful music? I think there is, and most songwriters would agree that it depends in large part on what the audience reaction to a song is. It’s very possible to write good music and have it be unsuccessful, but it all comes down to the definition of those terms.

In most people’s books, a good song means that it’s got a strong lyric, supported by a strong, interesting set of chords, and delivered by a well-contoured melody. Of course, all of those descriptive words (“strong”, “interesting”, “well-contoured”) are not precisely definable. It’s why one person can love a song while another can hate it.

A successful song? Well, that really depends on what you want. If you’ve written a song that no one hears, you may consider that unsuccessful. But if you’ve written it for your grandmother and it brings tears to her eyes, that may be exactly what you were trying to do, and you’ve been very successful.

But in most cases, how we know a song has been successful is that people keep wanting to return to it — to keep coming back to hear it again and again. The formula for achieving that is hard to define, but most songwriters would agree that the following five points are vital to building a fan-base for your music.

1. Create a strong chorus hook – it’s the easiest way to make a song memorable. As you know, there are several kinds of hooks. The most powerful type — the one that really brings listeners back — is the one that sits in the song’s chorus or refrain, and incorporates the song’s title. To be effective, a hook needs to be short, melodically interesting, and rhythmically enticing. A current example of a great chorus hook is “Don’t You Worry Child” (Swedish House Mafia Featuring John Martin)
2. Place lyrics in your music so that the pulses of the words happen naturally. It’s hard for an audience to understand what you’re singing if the rhythm of your melody places stresses on the wrong syllables of your lyric. And even if a listener can tell what the words are, it’s harder for them to remember them later if you’ve disrupted the natural flow of the words.
3. Make sure lyrics progress from descriptive to emotive. If you start your song by emoting over something you haven’t described yet, the audience feels you’re simply singing for yourself, and it’s a musical turn-off. Your verses don’t need to be completely devoid of emotion, but give the audience something like a story or a situation. That way, when you start to describe an emotion (typically in the chorus), the audience can feel it to.
4. Make your song’s instrumentation interesting. If your song is being delivered by a rhythmically uninteresting guitar strum, with bass, keyboards, drums and other instruments simply keeping time, you’ve missed out on a great opportunity to give listeners a reason to return to that song. Work to make your song’s instrumentation interesting, which doesn’t mean that it needs to continually pull focus from the song itself. As you prepare the instrumental for your song, do a lot of listening to good music. What is it instrumentally that works well? Incorporate some of those ideas into your own music.
5. Make sure your song’s melody has a nice shape with a climactic moment. How your melody is written has a lot to do with genre. The kind of melody that works in a typical dance number is going to differ from what you’d write for a ballad. But in most cases, the melodies that dwell around one note with no interesting features are going to be tough for listeners to remember. Give your melody an interesting shape so that people can easily remember it.

All of this assumes that you’ve done the other things that make it easy for someone to hear your music in the first place. This includes the making of high quality recordings of your music, along with building a strong social media presence.