Jay Frank – HuffPost 9.29.10

[Note: This is advice in the context of the interview more than as a result of that direct question.]

Mike Ragogna: Jay, you have a history of being one of the music industry’s gate keepers. You were the head of music programming at Yahoo Music, right?

Jay Frank: I was the head of music programming at Yahoo for seven years, and I currently am the Senior Vice President of Music Strategy for CMT.

MR: Okay, so at CMT, what are you looking for? What are some of the strategies that are involved in your daily work?

JF: Well, my daily work is trying to make music that is going to succeed cross-platform–television, internet, mobile, and radio. What we’re looking for are songs that really can actually cut through, that speak to people, and that are active. This is not a time for passive songs. There used to be a time where songs just sort of sifted into the background, embedded themselves into your skull, and then somebody might want to go buy them because they’re familiar. This is a time, now, when it’s a very active culture, and therefore, active songs are what people respond to. We tend to look for those much more than others, and it has to make a dent. This is certainly a time when anybody who is just going to make an average song or do something that just sort of says something but doesn’t really make a statement will seldom sell anymore.

MR: Interesting. So, that brings us into another territory here–when artists are looking at this environment, how should they be approaching it?

JF: Well, the first thing that I say to everybody is that you have to impress the listener in seven seconds. When you look at the way that people are discovering music online, whether it’s through mostly internet radio, streaming on a website, downloading it legally, or downloading it illegally, the reality is that nearly every music experience starts at the same point, and that’s at the beginning of the song. And it seems obvious, but the reality is that this is a new thing. Most people were discovering music through radio and television, and in radio and television, you might switch the station and stumble along a song in the middle. Now, though, when you hear about a song, you’re discovering it at the same exact point of the song, and that’s the beginning. One of the things that I’ve seen time and time again through data is that as many as half of the people who go to discover a song leave the song within the first seven seconds. People are really giving songs that little of a time to impress them. If you’re not actually wowing them, you’re doing your song a disservice. So, I really advocate very strongly to artists, no matter which way you do it, at some point, you’ve got to engage the listener very, very quickly.

MR: What other kinds of advice do you have?

JF: I’ve got a lot of different advice. One of the other things I like to talk about is, much like other songwriting ideas, you have to think about the beginning, middle, and end of the song. The difference now, in the digital age, is that you have to think about it differently. Time and time again, we’ve seen through data that at about the two-minute mark in the song or the middle of the song, the audience grows a little bit bored of it, and I think for the younger audience in particular I call it the mix-tape mentality. They’re so used to hearing DJ mixes, where the song shifts every minute and a half to two minutes, that at that point, if the song just continues to do the same old thing, in their brain, they go, “Well, I’ve heard all this already. I don’t need to hear anymore,” and they leave the song. If they leave the song, they are creating a negative impression in their mind about that song, even if they may have liked it. So, I encourage artists to do something in that two-minute area to make sure that somebody is going to stay engaged. Then, at the end of a song, you want to do something that will leave people remembering it. I talk a lot about putting in false or incomplete endings, failing to do chord resolutions, and things like that because what ends up happening is you want somebody to stop listening to a song, and then as they go on to whatever the next song is, find that that the song they just finished is still stuck in their head. A lot of that is because if you leave the song incomplete, then the brain is going to try to fill in the gaps and make that song complete in their head. It’s just a very, very sneaky way for the artist to make sure that their song is going to be memorable compared to others. The competition out there is way too dramatic. If you actually tried to listen to every single song that comes out in a given week, it’s physically possible for you to hear only five percent of the recorded music that is released in a given week, which is astounding. So, you have to do whatever you can to make sure that your song has that edge and is remembered because otherwise, you’re going to be listened to once, and then get lost in the clutter.