You've got a friend in me?

Like I said last week, "Radio Friendly" is a term I use a lot. And If you ask any one who knows me well I'm not a fan of any thing that's radio friendly. Now, I'm not talking about songs edited for radio; I really don;t care if the songs edited or not. I'm talking about songs that are structured to be played on the radio. There is a specific formula that an artist can follow to be insured that they can be played on radio. Its simple really; All you need is a song that
runs close to 3:11 in length and has a structure similar to this- [Intro, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, (Optional break and a chorus refrain), Outro] Why do songs set up like this do so well? To be honest with you I don't really know. And this structure idea has been around for quite a while. Have you ever wondered why some of the Beatles' older songs are so short? Its because they knew that they were playing to an audience of radio listeners who had short attention spans. I'm I saying that all songs that follow this "radio friendly" song structure are bad? No. But I am saying that if artist focus solely on creating radio songs then other tracks not bound to be singles will suffer during the creative process. This all relates back to last weeks blog post. If we focus only on one aspect of music then record labels will start having their bands focus on that aspect. If all we want are short poppy tunes then that's what they will give us.