Professional songwriters often need or want to write in specific genres. This video explains 5 different ways to understand and emulate musical genre.

This video was made for a Songwriting class I teach at Collarts in Melbourne, Australia. A major project during the semester is to write a song to a specific brief provided by a music publisher, which asks for songs in a specific genre.

In order to write for this aspect of the commercial industry, it’s important to know how to listen to songs, and define the necessary characteristics of the genre so that you can emulate those characteristics, while still bringing in your own creativity to the project.

Genre is notoriously difficult to nail down, but in this video, I go through five concepts that are often at the heart of defining a genre.