Help me categorize this song?

[jerrybeirne]

First year on Taxi, has been an educational experience so far. Had a few forwards, and lots of great feedback from the screeners here.

I recently did a custom critique here (very valuable) and told was a bit too jazz influenced maybe, when I was going for more of a indie pop or indie rock vibe. Also I had a proper name in there which I knew would be a problem but I had other plans for the song anyway. So I tweaked a lot of it and just pushed up a new version, the first song "I Need Ya" on my profile.

https://www.taxi.com/members/jerrybeirne

Any thoughts on the song itself, the mix/mastering or what opportunities I should consider this for? I was on the other thread about what makes a song contemporary, and it's definitely something I deal with, where my musical influences affect my songwriting when I don't really hear it myself. I don't want to necessarily target a particular genre, I want to let a song go where it wants to go, but I also want my songs to be successful. Many of my other songs are definitely more jazz-oriented, this is as "pop" as I think I can get.

thanks!
Jerry

[nicorivers]

I can see that this is too "jazzy" for modern indie pop. I could see this fitting a retro 70's pop brief if you applied a 70's mixing style to it. You could some strings and replaced that little guitar solo with a melody led by the strings.

Catchy melodies and clean arrangement. He clean and honest sounding voice reminds me of Tennis - which has a very retro sound.

[jerrybeirne]

I can see that this is too "jazzy" for modern indie pop. I could see this fitting a retro 70's pop brief if you applied a 70's mixing style to it. You could some strings and replaced that little guitar solo with a melody led by the strings.

Catchy melodies and clean arrangement. He clean and honest sounding voice reminds me of Tennis - which has a very retro sound.

Thanks for the feedback - I think I'm gonna get rid of the guitars as the main part of the song.

[cosmicdolphin]

I don't want to necessarily target a particular genre, I want to let a song go where it wants to go, but I also want my songs to be successful.

That's fine for artist stuff but for sync you need to be a lot more focused. Sync licensing is essentailly a service industry so you kinda have to give them what they want. As that's what their clients need and will pay for.

Songs that don't fit well into known genres will be hard to find homes for. Knowing what your aiming for at the outset will give you a much better chance of nailing a song that can be licensed over following your muse and seeing how it turns out. This is why we have listings and reference tracks to work from and write to.

Skipping through a few of your songs they all sound quite jazzy with a little funk influence, I think you'd need to up the prodution several notches to compete but there's a whole world of jazz influenced songs in the industry. Not everyting needs to be contemporary.

Mark

[jerrybeirne]

Thanks so much for your reply Mark. Yes a few of my songs were older ones where the production wasn't great, but I think/hope I've gotten better. I've just been doing this for a couple of years. The ones that got forwarded (Your Girl, And Now You Go Back To Her) I think sound pretty good.

Even doing artist type stuff, the world of music seems to revolve around Spotify playlists, and by definition they categorize a certain type of music. And if my music overlaps 2 or 3 genres, that's not good. I tried things like Submithub too, same problem there. So yeah, I will take your advice and try to stick within the confines of certain genres, if I am able to.

Thanks again,
Jerry