5 Solid Ways To Check If Your Music Really Is Good Enough To Release

Music appreciation is subjective. We all know this, and it’s one of the reasons why you can spend endless nights debating with your friends over whether the latest Flying Lotus release is really better than his production work with Thundercat or whether there is artistic merit in the Cloud Rap niche and how it might do better to integrate some of the sounds of drum & bass.

It’s rare to find someone who likes *exactly* the same kind of music as you, especially once you start delving a little deeper than “yeah, I guess I like to listen to all sorts of stuff”.

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Do We Consume Music More, Enjoy It Less?

Scientists say that our brain reacts to great music similar to way it reacts to sex.

In both of these situations, the experience of pleasure that we have is mediated by the release of the brain’s reward chemical, dopamine. This finding is based on the results of experiments done by analyst Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Music produces an intellectual reward, because the listener has to follow the sequence of notes to appreciate it. For the study, the participants were asked to choose instrumental pieces of music that gave them goosebumps. Lyrics were banned, so the associations the participants might have to the words in the music didn’t confound the final results.

Songs couldn’t have specific memories attached either.

While listening to their chosen music, Salimpoor’s team measured things like heart rate and increases in respiration and sweating. During these listening sessions, a 6-9% relative increase in their dopamine levels was detected in participates when compared to a control condition in which participants had listened to each other’s music selections.

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The Music Manipulation Curve (theory)

As the effort (time and cost) required to create a highly-personalized listening session of music (see blue bars below) decreases, the per-person rate of music consumption will proportionately increase (see green bars below).

If there has been one constant in the music industry over the last one hundred years, it has been the constant migration to listening formats (easier formats) that reduce the effort required to create highly-personalized listening sessions. You can’t play a phonograph on the bus or clip it to your shorts at the gym.

Moreover, easier formats that can be summoned on-demand (for any given situation) will displace any format that requires more effort to produce the same result.

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Learning When To Listen

As a musician–a creator of sounds–it can be difficult to understand the concept that music is mostly about listening, not creating.

It’s about listening for just the right amount of silence between notes. Listening for the sounds that give you cues how to act next, and how to hone your performance.

The skill of listening is what separates the great musicians from the mediocre ones.

Becoming known as a listener will help you score gigs as a session musician and will greatly enhance your own musical mastery. 

Here are four scenarios where listening can greatly affect your performance.

Listening To Other Musicians

The greatest factor to playing well with other musicians is each musician’s inherent ability to listen to each other.

Listening is an amazing tool. It will let you know when a drummer wants to end a song, or when a guitar player is stepping down to finish a solo. Listening gives you the foresight to step in and play when another musician needs help.

Listening To Your Audience

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