Songwriting - Balancing Innovation with Predictability

Everyone's looking for innovation when it comes to writing songs. Obviously, you don't want your songs to just sound like every other song out there. You want yours to stand out. Making a song stand out from the rest requires innovation - a new approach. But here's the danger: if your songs are too innovative, you'll find that listeners can get confused, or even bored. Songs need to have something predictable about them. In other words, if your song is too innovative, it can drive your audience away.

Innovation is not a bad thing, and many great bands and singers have spent years building up an audience for their material by being innovative. But for the most innovative performers out there, the building of that audience will require a long time, and lots of patience.

This article is for those of you who want to build audiences quickly. It