We are not Average Listeners

As producers, we are not average listeners. It is helpful to recognize that the majority of people who listen to our music don't experience it the way we experience it. They don't listen to other music the way we tend to listen to it. It's hard for us to switch off our production experience and listen purely for enjoyment - if that bass gets buried in the mix during the chorus, it could be hard for us to ignore, even if the song overall is fantastic. We may chase "perfection", but many great, hugely popular songs fall far short of this. It's useful to keep this in mind.

Here are some thoughts on how average listeners listen to music, and how this may differ from how we producers/engineers listen.


Average listeners:

-Don't know and don't care you've used loops. This includes musical loops, even the main musical hook of the song.
Tip: we should do what feels right to us. If we can sleep fine and use loops, we should keep using them - and take no notice of people who say loops make baby Jesus cry.

-Don't care about the gear you've used - hardware/software, analog/digital, synthesizer/sampler/rompler.
Tip: we should use whatever we're using to make great music. Producer nobody on forum nowhere only uses and likes music made with 1970s analog synthesizers? Good for them and irrelevant for us.

-Won't notice or care about the hours of work you put into small background details.
Tip: we can keep spending these hours on our passion. Who cares if other people don't notice, or care? We care. These hours are quality music time, "us time". Unless we're actually obsessing over details which literally nobody will ever notice.

-(As with every field), will greatly underestimate how hard it is to create a great sounding, musically pleasing song.
Tip: we should keep making great sounding, musically pleasing songs. In the end, that's what matters, not that we created the bass patch ourselves and used twenty tracks for the vocal line. Let people simply enjoy them or dance to them, even if they think it's as easy as making toast or building a spaceship.

-Are into the current hot trend which many of us may find unlistenable. That's why the current hot trend is selling more than our style.
Tip: we can be inspired by the current trend or stick with our style. Either way works. We're only going to create good, listenable music if we're somewhat engaged with our creation - if we hate the current style, we're not going to be able to create great music in that style. In the end, we can't control the public's tastes, but we can control the quality of the music we create, whatever our style happens to be.

-Are going to talk about hooks/easy-to-describe-noteworthy things - "hah! I kissed a girl!". If your song is based on a very effective chord progression and interesting rhythmic groove, people are going to have a lot of difficulty talking about it to their other non-musical friends.
Tip: are we making music for other producers, or a wider audience? In some ways creating music for other producers is easier - they'll often cut us some slack. They may praise us if we've used some technical wizardry and disregard our ineffective groove or complete lack of melody. The dancefloor isn't as forgiving. If we're going for a wider audience, we need to make sure the wider audience can easily communicate our song to each other - a simple, catchy melody they can hum, a memorable lyric, some kind of hook.

-Are going to love our song and think it's perfect. As producers, as people who have developed an intimate relationship with sound over years, it can sometimes be a while between songs we hear which blow us away, which we consider "perfect". When I was younger, before I learned how music was created, how all the bits were put together, I sometimes got that feeling several times on an album. Sure, we can appreciate the skill of the artist or producer, but we can't unlearn our art and listen to songs with a pure music fan's ears (well, maybe if they're songs in a style we've never tried to create).
Tip: We should get our music out there and give people a chance to love it. The person who builds a cover song entirely out of loops using cheap software in a couple of hours and gets people dancing has contributed more than the person who has been working on an original analog synth composition for the past year and shelves it because it "isn't perfect".

I'm sure there are a lot of other examples I could have used. The main thing for us to bear in mind is that the majority of people don't listen to music the way we do.

Keep making great music!
Fabian