Originally Posted By: Muzic Trax

He said that radio wants to be able to hear the hook within 30 seconds to grab the listeners attention.


Study Western Music long enough and one can make the case that the same thing can be said for musics composed long before the invention of radio.

For one example, Beethoven hits us with his musical hook with the very first 4 notes of his Fifth Symphony.

There are plenty more examples.

My take on it is that the real reason has to do with our humanity, the way our sense of evaluating musics works, the way our memories work regarding such things and likely a lot of stuff that is so deep it would take a few more centuries of study, investigation, learning and understanding ourselves and the way our brains not only perceive things, but why.

We too often confuse correlation and causation of things. In the case of radio airplay, it is far more likely that the rules of the game evolved to be what they are today, rather than the medium of radio forcing those rules upon the songwriter. Of course, the technology of recording also had a hand in that, the original 78 rpm records could only contain so much amount of time per side and the same can be said for the original 33 rpm records, the manufacturers touting the "Long Play" 33 rpm records rather late in the technology's life span, actually. When that became a "thing" - we did indeed have long songs being played on the radio for that particular era. Such may make a comeback someday, as everything old becomes new again to succeeding generations. The songs might get longer again, but the medium will be digital.

But even those popular long songs of the late 60's are defined predominantly by their HOOKS.

Hooks can be musical hooks, rhythmic hooks, lyrical hooks or combinations of those.

Getting that hook out there within the first 30 seconds may not be a hard and fast rule, though, but when the entire performance is limited to the magic 3 minutes and 40 seconds that radio airplay brings to the issue, the modern songwriter should pay heed to the good advice.

One will see the situation at hand and proceed to complain about the situation, another will see the same situation and proceed to pursue success from within the defined parameters, for we humans just don't take to massive amounts of change all of a sudden, especially where music is concerned.

An old and successful writer once told me that if you want to introduce new things to music - you had better introduce ONE NEW THING AT A TIME - and even then, expect dissension because of it. History of musics bears that out.


--Mac

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