COMMERCIAL VS. CREATIVE MUSIC

​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. 

Is it different from what worked in the past? For sure! Is it better or worse? That’s a matter of opinion. The fact that the current commercial music is getting lighter and it might not be as meaningful as oldies like “My Way” or “Papa” is another discussion. But the bottom line here is that those songs were commercial at their own time and probably now the commercial music is what Katy Perry does! But do not forget that even in current commercial music we have poetic writers like Adele.
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Our goal here is to write better songs. By better songs, I mean songs that connect to your audience. Not necessarily anyone else’s audience. Yours. Whatever that might be. Whether you want to write songs that your family enjoys hearing at family reunions, or you want to write songs that millions of people hear on the radio, it’s all about communication. Unless you plan to be like “Neighbor Bob” and only play your songs for yourself, you need to communicate well. Commercialization is always a great improvement for any business and here in music industry we are also doing business. As soon as one understands this fact and understands how the business world works, they would understand that our music is our product and we need to make it the way that our sales people (publishers) can sell it for us. Otherwise, you are just throwing gibberish on paper.
 
Turning your work in a commercial product is not a bad thing at all and in fact it is an achievement for a songwriter if they can write commercially accepted music. It means they can create the music that the mass audience would enjoy, and if this is not the goal for a songwriter, I don’t know why on earth they are in the industry. Writing music just for sake of writing it will not take you anywhere! You need to write for people, for public, for mass audience if you want to be successful in this business, and the first step for it is to understand how you can write commercial music that the majority of listeners will enjoy. And you can do it in various of incredibly creative ways. 

Author

Hangi Tavakoli is our in-house established and professional music producer with more than 17 years of experience in songwriting, music production, mix and mastering. He has produced more than 3,000 and written more than 4,800 published songs to-date, including some major hits in international scale.