It's about popularity. And not long-term popularity. But popularity right here, right now. Even making a timeless, great song doesn't necessarily mean that your song will perform well on the Hot chart.
Take Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"— which Polygraph recently found to be the most played song of the '90s on Spotify—as an example. It wasn't even in the Top 5. Freshness guaranteed 12 expertly-curated coffee surprises delivered to your door in the form of a holiday advent calendar.
What determines whether a song will become number one isn't how popular it is on a grand scale, but how able it is to permeate the human consciousness and become popular in a very particular instant. What makes a song "good enough" to be number one, then, isn't it's quality of performance, but it's quality of repeat. A great number one song can be played over and over and over again. And those plays, circularly, are what make it the number one song in the country.
The Billboard Hot chart is calculated on a weekly basis. For a long time, the Billboard charts counted from Monday to Sunday as a standard week. But starting in July , when new music began to standardly come out on Fridays, Billboard has been tracking a single week from Friday to Thursday. At the end of the week, your numbers reset. And we find out what the number one song is every Tuesday.
Are you keeping up? So there's a huge benefit to releasing song or album on the standard release day Friday ; it helps to take advantage of the way the system counts sales. Release day matters a lot, for the Hot albums chart as well, not just for singles. Because she released it on a Friday, and at that time the week in music sales was counted from Monday to Sunday, her "first week" of sales only included that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. She didn't get the "instant million" recognition that Taylor Swift did The playing ground was not equal.
But it certainly matters for an artist trying to make an impact, trying to get attention for their first song. To be clear, this doesn't mean that your only chance to have a number one single is immediately after it comes out. The tempo of a song is also known to play into whether or not a piece of music will rise in the charts.
That said, there are both upbeat and slower songs that top the charts, each with their own ideal tempo. A few years ago the ideal tempo for an upbeat track was BPM and this still is a great starting place. However, recent years have seen a rise in the tempo on number one singles. When it comes to mastering the songwriting formula for hits, the more digestible you can make a track the better. Keeping the verses simple in form will make them memorable and relatable when the second verse roles around.
Not only that but a short verse will help you get to the main attraction the hook even quicker. Just make sure your verses are still adding content to the song, despite simplicity. Short verses have one major downfall in pop music; they can dramatically cut down on the length of a song.
The pre-chorus will add excitement that builds to the gratification of the chorus. This is often the better choice as it breeds familiarity. As already mentioned, any songwriting techniques to make the music quickly digestible is part of the magic formula.
A repeating pre-chorus does this beautifully and by the end of the first chorus your listener will already know more than half the song. With all of this in mind what is the best structure when trying to write a number one hit?
The tried and true method is:. Often it will act as a type of post-chorus that brings things back to the verse. Such a song would be optimally differentiated: different enough to stand out, but not so much so as to alienate large groups of potential listeners.
The preceding chart compares the typicality of Top 40 songs to all songs that did not reach the Top 40 on the Hot and demonstrates that there is not a profound difference between these two groups. Yet in most years, Top 40 songs are slightly more atypical on average than the rest of the charts. On the other hand, the following chart shows how 1 songs compare to all other charting songs in a given year.
Though more variable, songs that hit 1 are generally less typical, often substantially so. Writing a song specifically to hit the top of the charts requires some idea—at best an educated guess—of the type of music that will be out and popular by the time it is released.
What becomes popular next is likely to be slightly differentiated from the last round of hits, leading to a constant evolution of what is popular.
Popularity is a moving target, but the context always remains relevant. Ultimately, while it may be possible to reverse-engineer a song to generate a high degree of popularity, doing so neglects the competitive context of the time. For those striving for a 1 hit, it pays to be a little unique —but not too far out there: Songs still need a hook for listeners to grab onto.
As with most innovation, this is what makes popular culture popular: the right balance between familiarity and novelty. Finding the appropriate level of differentiation in a given competitive context is at least as much art as it is science.
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