#8 Modern pop song form

Pop music obviously derives from ‘popular’, but like all art forms, whatever is currently popular changes. While individuality is always to be encouraged, if you want your tunes to fit well against the current landscape, they’ll inevitably need to conform to some extent to what your audience are expecting. This applies not only to the sound, production and genre of a song, but also to its structure.

Successful pop songwriters always keep things simple enough to lock a tune into a listener’s subconscious, with enough tonal variety to keep them interested. So, while there are no hard rules to structuring a song,