A Reinvented Pop Song Structure For The New Millenium
So there are a number of song structures out there that have arisen since the dawn of man.
A few typical pop song structures that expand on the idea of ABA or AABA are included in the graphic below. Clicking will take you to Wikipedia.
Today I’m going to explore a new pop song structure with you that is designed to be ear catching but at the same time the flow of the song idea differentiates your music when you use it.
This song structure is primarily defined by running through sections ABC*, possibly with a return to A at the end (becoming ABCA). In the streaming era, we know that the 30 second mark is our glorious threshold for triggering those sweet sweet streaming revenues.
*technically this is like a shortened Rondo structure, but without the return at the end
Typically, pop music structure incorporates a lot of refrains and choruses. This repetition is baked into the song because the idea is you want someone listening to get the chorus and have it earworm into their minds.
But today, for listeners that really like an artist or maybe even really like a song the repetition doesn’t necessarily need to be baked in. Baking the repetition in means that listeners spend more time generating the same streaming revenue transaction as if they’d listened for only 30 seconds.
“Simplicity is the highest form of elegance.”
Take a song like Old Town Road by Lil Nas X. The structure for this song is a super compressed ABA’.
A = chorus as intro.
B = verse 1 (only one verse anyway).
A’ = full chorus at the end.
We’ve also got this whole thing bookended with a 4ish bar intro and outro. Super simple. Less than two minutes. And you know what? You run that shit back. And every time you do, Lil Nas X gets a ~penny.
The ABC pop song structure I’m highlighting here, much like Old Town Road, is a hyper condensed format that utilizes 3-4 sections lasting between 25-40 seconds each to create a sonic tapestry that is highly replayable, features three distinctly listenable components, and is structurally different from most other pop music. It hits all the right notes on the way out the door, plus it’s distinctive.
A traditionalist might look at this and say this makes a lot of sense and that this structure already exists. A traditional pop song has 3 sections usually: the verse, the chorus, and the bridge. They interplay between each other and ultimately provide a fresh audio experience for the listener by breaking up the repetition of the Verse/Chorus blocks with a bridge section typically in the last half of the song.
Technically, this is correct. But the power behind the ABC structure is the intent that is driving the song concept forward. It’s a pop song structure that can give attention deficit listeners a concentrated dose of sounds & vibes from an artist they like. It can give an artist more freedom to express themselves “from concentrate”, instead of worrying how they might wrap a second verse into a chorus into a bridge and then an outro chorus.
The difficulty with doing anything new is the adoption curve. I think at the moment this song structure isn’t being utilized by many charting artists in the mainstream, however we have examples of this hyper-condensed pop music that is bespoke for streaming platforms like Whack World by Tierra Whack, whose songs follow an even more condensed structure of 5-10 second intro, 30 sec verse, 20 sec hook, 5 sec outro. This is ABC folks. And guess what? That project went super viral last year when it came out.
Next time you’re sitting down to write a song, consider trying out the ABC format. It may spark something epic.
