​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. 

Who would want to say this? An artist is a brand. If a song doesn’t fit their brand, they aren’t going to sing it, no matter how good the song might be. If you can come up with a handful of artists that might think your song fits their brand, you are on the right track. If you can’t, you probably aren’t writing a commercial idea. For instance, I once wrote an amazing song about a boy catching his father cheating on his mom. It was a GREAT song. The only problem was, no one wants to stand on a stage and call his or her father a cheater in front of 60,000 people every night. The audience would believe that it was true. That’s not going to happen. Asking myself “Who would want to say this?” would have saved me some disappointment.

​How does this make the artist look? If you are not painting the artist in a positive light, you have almost no chance of getting a song recorded. 

Ever wonder where your favorite artists or songwriters consistently get those great song ideas from? I like to think of ideas as a creative river, constantly flowing by. It’s simply a matter of learning to catch them. I always have my antenna up. Basically, everything around us can give us hundreds of very interesting ideas to be used in the songs or to have the songs being written around them. Here are some simple techniques that you can use to find hit ideas right away.
 
Watching movies for song ideas. Many classic songs have used lines from your favorite movies as titles. Kenny Chesney wrote the hit song “You Had Me From Hello” after watching the movie Jerry Mcguire. Kenny called songwriter Skip Ewing after hearing the line spoken in the movie and the duo turned it into a blockbuster hit. In a lot of great movies, specially the classic ones there are tons of quotes and sentences that each of them can be translated in at least one great song. ​