When a musician releases an album, how do they decide what songs are going to be singles? I understand that singles tend to be the songs that they think will be the most popular, but how do they figure this out?
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As artists finish songs on an album they send those songs out to other people in the music industry. They more or less have to do this to avoid something called unintentional copyright infringement.
Unintentional copyright infringement is a fairly common thing where artists will unintentionally insert parts of other songs that they’ve heard in the past into their current song. By sending the song out to other artists, producers, and industry insiders they get a pretty comprehensive look over of the song to make sure that it is 100% original, or if its not to fix it or obtain the proper licensing rights.
Another effect of sending songs out for preview is that they get generalized feedback on the song. If the feedback is overwhelmingly negative the song might be remade or dropped entirely. If the feedback is overwhelming positive they usually release it as a single.
typically it’s the producer and not the writer or performer who decides which songs to release as singles. part of the producer’s job is to figure out which song or songs are likely to catch attention, and thus prompt people to buy the album.
obviously this paradigm works a little differently now in the era of streaming subscriptions, but the same basic principle is at play. producer selects a single, single gets pushed out to the public every way possible, public hears single, public hopefully likes it enough to seek out the rest of the album.
Singles are usually going to be the songs that grab attention- they’re usually short, follow a familiar pop/rock song structure, they have high energy or a catchy hook. That usually eliminates ballad, long-form, or interlude tracks that appear on an album. After that, it’s whatever the artists/producers/label executives think will be successful. Singles tend to be more popular simply by being released as singles.
Im not in the music industry, but I think it has to do with how much they want to invest in recording their songs, and how much time a producer is willing to spend on them. Example, if an unknown artist gets a deal with a producer to use a studio, it is probably better for the artist to spend a week recording one song and go back to street gigs rather than spend two months recording a full album if that album only gets a few thousand listens. The producer knows this, and wants lotsa money. So the producer can convince an artist to make a single just to get their name out, and come back later when they have more fans.
Traditionally, the single was really used as a form of advertising for the band – so you would want to choose a song that stands out when you hear it on the radio or being played on TV, that has a good hook that you will still be humming after the song has ended, and is short enough that djs would be happy playing it fairly regularly.
Normally the process of choosing which track this would be is as simple as listening through the album and picking the tracks that stand out the most, and that fit the requirements for length and similar.
It is also possible to write a song with the specific intention of being a single that will hopefully perform well in the charts – most of this cones down to listening to ask if there popular songs at that moment in time, and trying to write a song that includes all of the elements that you are hearing regulularly used at that point – a purposely catchy virus for example, or different musical styles or instruments that are currently popular. That might be the boy band harmonies, a Caribbean style rhythm, or making sure to include a bit of dubstep electronics and a bass drop.
As a “semi-professional” musician, in my experience in the context of a band (where we do have a record label but he mostly handles distribution and that kind of stuff, we still retain 100% autonomy both creatively and as far as, say, marketing or plans or whatever go), we choose the single almost in a process of elimination and thinking like, which song is more likely to appeal to the most amount of people AND represents the band the most. So for example, say track n. 7 is quite experimental / kinda progressive (and the band ISN’T a prog band), it most probably won’t be the single. Than there’s another track, it’s really good, but it’s kind of a bit too different from our usual style, it probably won’t be the single. So on and so fourth; sometimes there’s an easy consensus on which one is the single, sometimes we’re at like 3 or 4 possible choices and we either do internal voting, ask for the opinion of people we trust, ask our label’s opinion, or even release multiple singles (maybe release one as a lyric video and the other as an actual music video, or whatever).
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