What makes commercial music successful?

There are four components to having successful commercial music and an act.  These are Melody, Beat, Lyrics, and Performance.

Any of them can be the driving force behind a song.  You have to have a combination of at least two for success.  No matter how good the first three are, a bad Performance will sink the ship unless your goal is to sell the song to someone else.

The Performance is major.  The song will be played for an audience.  The audience wants to be entertained.  They do not generally care if you are poetic or musically accomplished.  They want to be amused and distracted from their everyday routine.

Professional Music is not an Art, it is Show Business.

There are classic examples of people who were more than good and made it on performance although they may not have written the material.  Have you ever heard of Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley?  Great vocalists, great performers, wrote very little or no material.

Name the successful people or acts which had great material but could not perform.

Many people might say Bob Dylan, that he could not sing.  This is nonsense.  Bob Dylan was a Stylist.  A Stylist is someone who may not be a strong singer but can strongly put a song through to an audience on an emotional level.

Mick Jagger is a Stylist also.  They both have limited vocal ranges but can emotionally reach an audience.  Madonna is also a Stylist.  Huge names but not good singers by the classical definition.

A good portion of the material from the first Led Zeppelin album is alleged to have been stolen from other artists.  Regardless of how they did it, they could perform.  Not only could they perform but every band I have ever heard who tried to copy their style only partially understood it.  This is why the would be copycats usually were a droning wall of noise.  Audiences didn’t care, they simply wanted to be entertained.

I chose Led Zeppelin specifically because they understood what most bands in their genre don’t.  This is called Arrangement.  Arrangement is Who Plays What When.  This could better be described as when not to play combined with Call and Response.  Call is a statement from a vocalist or instrument, Response is the reverse statement answering.  Listen to Black Dog.

Page, Jones, and Bonham had all been studio musicians who had known each other for years playing behind other artists.  Jimmy Page played on Goldfinger.  All of these people had learned music by playing for highly professional arrangers.  They weren’t a bunch of buddies who formed a band.

This is why their music is so good although most of the material was performances more than well written songs which could be copied by someone else.  To the best of my knowledge almost no one has recorded a copy of a Led Zeppelin song other than Stairway To Heaven.  However the value of Stairway To Heaven is estimated to it having made around $550,000,000 in a plagiarism court case.  The movie Dazed And Confused wanted to use the Led Zeppelin song performance for the film.  The value of the performance was more than the budget for the entire movie.

You might be wondering what my point is.  The point is very simple.  You may be a great poet or an accomplished composer but at the end of the day it is how well you can communicate EMOTION to an audience.  The world revolves around Myth not Reality, Style not Substance.  If it revolved around Reality there would be no religions or political parties.