​Are your songs not getting results? Is that latest greatest song you’ve written not having the impact on your audience that you were so sure it would. Often the difference in a good song and one that moves the listener is a simple quick fix.
                                                                                                                                                                         
Keep your intro under 15 seconds. One of the most common mistakes in commercial songwriting is the long intro. As a rule, intros should be 15 seconds or less. You will only have the listeners valuable attention for a short time. It’s important to keep that attention and get to the meat of your song. 15 seconds gives you enough time to set the mood and groove of your song and wet the listeners appetite for more to come! Basically your first 30 seconds of your song is the time you have to attract listener’s attention and make sure they are going to sit there and listen to your song. Don’t waste much of this precious time on a long intro. 

I have found that going back to my songs with a clear mind a week or two after I write them and running through this quick checklist helps me catch and fix many of the major flaws that can exist in a song. Print this one out and hang it in you writing or re-writing room to remind yourself to check these issues before you consider your song done. They are some minor points, but they have a huge impact on your song’s overall quality. Paying attention to these little details is what makes a difference between a good and a great song.
 
Is my message clear? I like to run my song by someone else and get their feedback. I ask them to summarize the message they understood from the song. If they don’t get out of it what I intended means I didn’t deliver the message very well, I work on it some more and check with them again until they exactly tell me a summarized version of what I was trying to say in the song.

​I don’t know how many times each week I hear the words “It’s impossible” when people get rejected to hear what they don’t want to hear. The ridiculous part of it all is that the things they are saying are “impossible” are not impossible at all. It just needs them to understand there is no such thing as impossible in this industry and to understand how they can defeat anything that might sound impossible to lots of people.
 
“It’s impossible to get a song cut if you don’t live in Nashville, New York or LA.” False. I am living in Singapore and every once in a while, I get a cut on an artist on a major label. Even a lot of times I wrote with the artist or other writers in the other side of the world using the magical power of technology, via Skype or even emails. Some names that you wouldn’t believe if I tell you, sat down on Skype and we came up with ideas together and wrote the song during the call! 

​One of the big questions I get over and over is whether writing commercial music requires you to sell your soul, abandon creativity, and forsake all that is good in this world. The answer is an emphatic “NO.” Basically this discussion of “art for art, or art for public” had always been going on and I never been solved, but here is my opinion about it. Any time this debate arises, there are those that say “Well, Jackson Browne did it his own way. He was poetic and commercial” or “Bob Dylan didn’t sell out; he wrote whatever he wanted”. It’s curious to me that every example that is ever thrown out to “prove” that you shouldn’t try to be commercial is a person that was commercially successful. No one ever says “I want to be like my neighbor Bob Smith. He writes crazy stuff that no one understands and plays it alone in his garage.” 
The people from the past that we try to model our work after were almost without exception successful commercial writers. They wrote what worked in their time. Those that are successful today are doing the same.