Hi Tobin,

I'm glad you found my last post useful and I'm very pleased to hear that you are working on this.

In this thread, I have been talking about modern pop chart SONGS rather than EDM. I think EDM would be more of a challenge for BIAB whereas all the songs in my list are proper chord/melody songs (quite conventional but in a modern style).

There are many other tools out there that are more suited to EDM, like Scaler 2, Arcade and Loopmaster. That's not to say that BIAB shouldn't have a go at EDM at some point if PG wants to but, as Peter Gannon indicated earlier in this thread, "Thanks for the list of song examples, that gives us good examples of the genres you’re looking for. We plan on making some realtracks and realstyles dedicated to some of the modern pop genres, especially the melodic/chord progression based ones."

I have found that Scaler and Arcade are not so helpful for pop songwriting and can't compete with the core functionality that BIAB offers.

As a longtime BIAB user and upgrader, I find the way PG bundles together styles from different genres as an incentive to upgrade doesn't work for me. I have so many styles now, in everything but contemporary pop, that more styles actually makes things worse because there are so many to wade through (and oompah and celtic styles seem to evade your filters... I can't get away from them cluttering up my searches!)

There are some excellent realtracks and drums that are very useable for pop and they are what I'm usually searching for (I rarely use all the instruments from a style). It would be great if these could be grouped together by PG, maybe under some foolproof search filter term, to help us find them easily (and close alternatives). That could be another step in making BIAB more useful and accessible to contemporary pop songwriters.

I agree with Jim and DeaconBlues that BIAB is a toolbox but, if PG wants to attract a new generation of users, it needs to pull all the elements together and make them easily accessible. There's no point in having 1000 loops if you have to wade through them alphabetically. I want BIAB to make pop songwriting a quicker process; at the moment it makes it longer for me, wading through so many options and generally not finding what I want (though there may well be lots of useable tracks for pop there in that haystack of 5,000 styles... somewhere!)

There are what I have referred to earlier in this thread as 'sub-genres' within contemporary pop - and Austin Hull deconstructs these very well - but they are primarily pop songs with a FLAVOUR (sorry, English spelling!) of another genre e.g. pop with a Trap flavour, rather than full-on hardcore Trap. So I suggest your first contemporary pop styles set should concentrate on Chart Pop, in different pop flavours, rather than try to appeal to purist EDM, Trap and House aficionados all at once.