I’m gonna just address this point because I think it’s really important and it’s about what you listen to.
Now, Â a lot of people, that I speak to when they’re joining the Songwriting Academy, I say, so how do you listen to music? And they’ll say, well, you know, I, I listen to the radio. and often the playlists on the radio are really, really small. not always, but on some of the major stations, certainly uk, the playlists are tiny, and very, very limited.
 So I’m going to address this in the way that I address a lot of incoming students into our platinum membership, by talking about how you listen. The first thing that I want you to consider, you may already be doing this, but the first thing I want you to consider in case you’re not,  is to un-restrict your listening.  Now, I know that there’s a lot of debate about whether the streaming platforms are fair or not.
I am a massive fan of the streaming platforms from a songwriting perspective because it opens up  my ability to listen to everything and anything, any time of the day. and also gives me the ability to skip songs that I would rather stick pins in my eyes than listen to. and that does happen. And not everything that, that I listen to in the charts, for example, I’m gonna love.
But with something like Spotify, which is my, weapon of choice, I’ll just skip the track. move on to something else. Â My advice to everybody that wants to be a professional songwriter, whether it’s for themselves or for other people as well. And frankly, I think even if you are the artist yourself, you should also be writing for other people too, to, extend your opportunities. but is to un-restrict your listening.
Get onto your platform, whether it be Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, whatever it is, and start  reaching out into those areas where you don’t normally go.  Now,  we often have  judgements about different types of music.  Some people might say, oh, I don’t really like rock music or country music. No, it’s not my thing.
 But I guarantee if you spend enough time listening to country playlists, rock playlists,  r and b, playlist, hip hop, rap, classical crossover, J-pop, k-pop,  pop, just general music, jazz, you will find tracks that you like. And I’m not talking about retro listening and going, and this is the other thing a lot, a lot of people do. They get into their comfort zone of listening to stuff that they grew up listening to their entire lives.
For me, if that were the case, I’d be stuck in prog rock Hell now, but thankfully I escape from prog rock hell. And I listen to other things as well. I occasionally dip into it every now and then just to get my fix. But I will listen to everything that is available to me. Â Why? Â Because there’s something good in all of it. Â Not all of it is amazing to me. Not all of it’s great or even good. But occasionally I will come across a track that I think is amazing.
 And the moment I find that I will create, have a playlist and I will add it to my playlist, and suddenly I’m swimming in the river of different genres of music.  And that for me is the key. Because if somebody sends you a brief, for example, somebody says, oh, we need a song in the j-pop style, or K-pop style of this particular artist, or We need a song like Ariana Grande or Michael Bule, whatever it is, we need a jazz song, a rock song, a  hip hop song, a dance song.
 I’m not, if I then try and pitch for that song, I’m not trying to copy something verbatim. I’m not just doing like writing by numbers, if you will, and producing by numbers.  What I’m actually doing is I already swim in that river and I can go,  actually, yeah, yeah. I’ve got a few tracks that are just like that, and I love them.  And the way that those tracks have been put together have sunk into my DNA, you know, by osmosis.
I’ve been learning about them without even trying. For me, this is a far better approach than, than listening, saying, oh my gosh, I don’t know any rock songs. ’cause I don’t normally write in that. So, oh, I better listen to a rock song. You end up sort of contriving a rock song, a pastiche of the rock songs you listen to, as opposed to going, oh, there are some rock songs that I totally love, and yeah, I could totally see myself writing for this brief.
So it’s about understanding that every style of music that you possibly can before you even, before you even try writing it. and you know what, and I challenge anybody  to do this because, so many people are closed off to it. So many people were going, no, it’s all rubbish. I had one guy actually say to me, everything in the charts right now is rubbish.
 And I was just astonished. It’s like, well, there are, there are 40,000 songs uploaded to Spotify every day, and you’ve listened to all of those, have you? And you know that they’re all rubbish. And he was saying to me, yeah, it was in the seventies and eighties, that’s when the great songwriters were. And I was like, you know what? Goodbye. I, we, you know, to, we’ve gotta be open-minded as songwriters. And we’ve gotta understand how the, how the music changes, how the style of writing changes, how the, the phrasing changes, the, the melo, the melodies that are used, the melodic intervals that are used, the placement, the production.
It all keeps changing and growing, and we’ve gotta keep up with it. Â If you don’t want to, that’s entirely your choice. It doesn’t affect my life whatsoever. the thing that keeps me young and able to write for the charts now is by listening to music that is happening right now. It’s nothing to do with age. Songwriting is not an age thing, it’s an attitude thing.
 So I’ve spent ages on the first line of my first slide, but this is a really important one. So this is what I challenge you guys to do. This is not your main assignment, but I challenge you to do this and see how much you learn.  I’d like you to, on your given platform, whether it be Spotify, apple, Amazon, et cetera, I want you to create a new playlist called the TSA playlist, just so you can identify it, with the Songwriting Academy.
 And I want you to branch out of all of your normal listening habits and go listen to every style of music that you possibly can.  And I want you to skip the songs that you’d rather track me things in the car door than listen to,  and the songs that you,  that get you in some way. There will be songs in every genre if you look hard enough that get you in some way. They might make you well up and want to cry.
They might make you want to dance around a room. They may make you feel 10 foot tall and bulletproof, Â but they, they affect you in some way. Playlist them, Â and then start listening to that playlist on rotation. Try and add five to 10 songs a day if you can. if you have enough time to, to listen to music throughout your day, don’t just listen to a song randomly playing and go, oh, that’s kind of cool. Playlist it, because if it affects you, then it could be a learning experience for you.
 The other type of song, those are the songs that you love. You know, the ones that get You. But the other ones that I want you to think about are the songs that are interesting. So first of all, songs that move you.  And secondly, songs that are new to you, they’re fresh, they surprise you in some way.
