Eli5: how a song is brought to production with ~90% new music and lyrics?

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There are new songs (and really good songs) released almost everyday. How writers write new songs that doesn’t violate copy rights, how singers and music composer decides what kind of accent/tone and background music (considering there are 100s of musical instruments these days) will suit a particular song and how it perfectly aligns with the movie scenes if it is part of a movie?
Please how they even decide which singer will sing a particular song unless it is solo albums?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

That’s the neat part: they don’t. You just pray that no other artist takes you to court because God knows: if anyone knows jack shit about how music works, it’s lawyers and judges. Which is why you have so many ridiculous rulings (lookup Adam Neely’s video on the topic for instance).

Anonymous 0 Comments

Music is obviously an art, so there is no easy way to explain the decisions composers make. In general, it takes one or many creative individuals to come up with ideas on what they want their song, or score, or whatever to sound like. To an extent, it’s a matter of the composer playing, singing, or writing something and deciding if they like it or not. At its core, that is what songwriting is.

Music theory and common production techniques do have things that can help, though. There is generally understood canon of notes and chords that tend to sound good together, which may be helpful for songwriters, yet sometimes breaking these rules can create unique and equally pleasing music.

A good songwriter listens to lots of different songs of different styles. Through this, they develop a personal library of certain sounds and their associated effects. For example, if I need to create a very specific emotion, I can think back to other songs that invoke that same emotion and try to associate those ideas into my own composition. This is very different from plagiarism since, ultimately, there are only 12 notes. All music is recycled from previous ideas done before, and for the most part, any given song is a combination of many other ideas from other musicians. The particular style and uniqueness come from exactly which ideas are used and how.