Forget marketing: 99% of artists I’ve met don’t understand this one thing

As an artist, the foundation to your success is attached to your ability to craft songs that connect with people and if you want to get to the next level, you need songs that connect with a lot of people.

You need those 'hit songs' that open up the doors and allow you the chance to get people to listen to your full body of work, and having those songs is the difference between success and failure in the music business.

It's no easy feat to write hit songs, in fact, the biggest songwriters on earth--who write songs all day, every day--may only write a handful of these songs every year.

With the odds of writing these 'hit songs' stacked against you, finding ways to use your songwriting time effectively as possible can make a dramatic difference toward increasing your chances of getting them.

First principles is a tool that can be used in any endeavor, as a way to break complex and difficult problems into more manageable and easier-to-tackle tasks.

The power of first principles has been shown and spoken about extensively by Elon Musk, who in an attempt to build rockets at SpaceX that would return to earth, used the method to demonstrate that the cost of the raw materials in creating a rocket was far less than the traditional costs associated with building them.

By breaking down your songs into their most basic elements such as the chorus melody and melody connecting lyrics, you can begin to build up from there and think of new ways to interconnect different elements that might not normally go together.

Using first principles as a tool to tackle your songwriting can help you save time and effort by uncovering useful solutions that might have been harder to come up with otherwise.

By focusing your energy on the parts of the song that matter the most, you can effectively 'hack' the creative process, and be in a position where you know that you're putting your energy into writing a song that has the winning components, that all hit songs have.

Ultimately, every hit song has a big 'payoff', in that it takes the listener to a place where there is a contagious melody and lyrics that connect and complement that melody.

If a song doesn't have this big payoff, then it will never be a song that can connect at a level to truly open doors for you and will therefore never be a hit song.

With this known fact, it makes sense to first work towards building a bank of these melodies and test them by sharing them with people around you, as a way to determine if they have the levels of contagion needed that justify you spending your time on developing the melody idea into a full song.

If you then only spend your time on developing ideas that you already know have the big payoff present, then your chances of writing songs that connect with people at scale will increase dramatically and you'll be able to accelerate your progression at a faster pace than you otherwise will if you just 'hope' that the hit songs will come.

Having a big payoff is one thing that will help you, but there is also much evidence (as there is in many creative endeavors), that by working with other great creative people, you drastically increase your chances of writing hit songs.

Finally, it goes without saying, that the more time you dedicate to the writing process, the more chance you'll also have of getting to a place where you'll find that hit song that can change the game for you.

By applying first principles to your songwriting endeavors, looking at what makes a hit song happen, and stacking these things on top of one another within your process, you'll be in a position where you know that you're putting your best foot forward toward writing hit songs.

Missed my first and most important article? here’s the link to it: