LET THE
SOFTWARE
BE THE JUDGE

HE BOOTS, YOU SCORE: Akon

by MORGAN STEIKER

Whoever said a pop song was the hardest thing in the world to make was right. What makes a Billboard hit? Getting the largest amount of people to listen has been explored for decades, but no formula can ever be absolutely definitive. There surely are certified hit-makers—Akon being one of them—but wildly popular songs have often surfaced out of nowhere to rule the charts for weeks. Although pop has gotten a rep for being kiddie stuff, it’s not easy or simple. It’s a science.

Hitlab.com, founded and based in Montreal, is willing to put all this to test with its own developed Dynamic Hit Scoring (DHS) technology, which breaks down a song into variables such as tempo, pitch and bassline, and compares it to 6,000 top Billboard hits from the past six years. Coupled with an online music community spearheaded by multi-platinum-selling artist Akon, this company offers, to anybody who signs up for a fee of $29.99, a chance to have their music analyzed and weighed as a potential hit, with the help of the artificial-intelligence software.

At a press conference here last week, Akon answered questions about the software and his involvement with the online community. “Once you are a member, you have access to the database and all the technology. You just hit the genre that you’re in and upload your song. It gets analyzed, compared to all those hit records, and then you get a score. If it’s low, you might go and change the tempo, or add vocals to the chorus. You just keep playing with it until you hit a higher score. On my account, I find out what the top 20 highest scores are all the time, so I can check them out.”

Montreal singer Saschali scored extremely high on the Web site after using the DHS software and became the first artist on Hitlab to be signed to Akon’s Konlive distribution company, which is releasing her debut album this year. The artist showcase that was held after the press conference also featured a singer called Janne, who is from Estonia and submitted her song to Hitlab only three weeks ago.

But this computerized method is robotic in its nature. Doesn’t this mean that all the music that will emerge from the online music community will end up being repetitive and similar? “There is no way you can make a song that doesn’t resemble a song that was made before, in one way or another,” Akon explains. “Music recycles itself constantly, over and over again. Even now, people are making music that is similar. As a producer, all these artists I work with ask me, ‘I want a record that sounds like right now.’ They want records that I’ve already done. With Hitlab, we don’t care who wants to sound like what. All we do is provide a service to make sure your music is compatible with what is out there. But as an artist, you have to want to be yourself.”