Useless Music Trivia: 5 Facts to Show Off With and What Artists Can Learn
Useless music trivia is the best thing to bring to a party. Here are five facts from music history that are well documented yet surprisingly few people know. Each one comes with a short lesson that helps with your own next release, so the knowledge isn't quite as useless as it sounds.
Yesterday was first called Scrambled Eggs
Paul McCartney has often told the story of the melody for Yesterday coming to him in his sleep. Since he had no lyrics yet, he sang it with a placeholder line: Scrambled Eggs. The words almost everyone can sing along to today came later.
The takeaway: working titles are fine as long as they don't make it into distribution. The title you enter in the release wizard goes to every store as metadata. Settle on it for good beforehand, spelling included. Renaming after you've shared your pre-save link confuses fans and can disrupt the matching.
U2 started out as Feedback, then The Hype
The band that fills stadiums as U2 formed in Dublin in 1976 under the name Feedback. They then called themselves The Hype, and only in 1978 did they become U2. The members have said themselves that they weren't especially fond of the name. It worked anyway.
The lesson for you: commit to your artist name before your first release. Stores build artist pages around the name, and if you switch later you often start from scratch there. Also check whether the name is already taken. When two acts share a name, releases can easily end up on the wrong artist page.
Nirvana's first single was a cover
Before Smells Like Teen Spirit made Nirvana famous worldwide, their first single came out on Sub Pop in 1988: Love Buzz. The song wasn't written by Kurt Cobain at all. It came from the Dutch band Shocking Blue, who had released it in the late sixties.
What to learn from it: a cover can be a good way in, but the composition belongs to someone else. In the credits, the original songwriters are listed as composer and lyricist, not you. Before release, find out which rights you need to put the cover out. Your own recording still gets its own ISRC, because the ISRC belongs to the recording, not the song.
John Cage's 4'33'' has no played notes
In 1952 in Woodstock, New York, pianist David Tudor sat down at a piano and played nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece by John Cage has three movements. The music is whatever you hear in the room: coughing, rustling, wind outside.
The lesson is surprisingly practical: even a piece without a single played note has a composer. In the same way, every one of your tracks needs complete credits, including a short intro or interlude. The stores require at least one composer and one lyricist per track. For a pure instrumental, ask how to fill in the details correctly before you start rather than entering something random.
Longplayer: a composition that runs for a thousand years
In an old lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London's Docklands, a piece called Longplayer has been playing since the turn of the year 1999 to 2000. Musician Jem Finer composed it to play for a thousand years without repeating itself. A computer runs it, constantly recombining recordings of singing bowls. It's set to end as 2999 turns into 3000.
That doesn't mean you should write long songs. But it's a reminder that a release doesn't end on day one. A song can still be discovered years later if it's listed properly in the stores and you keep talking about it. A smart link gives you one fixed address for that, working both before and after release.
What will your fact be?
Each of these songs started small: with placeholder lyrics, a band name nobody loved, or a cover on a small single. A lot of what followed came down to the music being out there in the first place.
If you want to release your song, OGRECORDS™ takes one upload to 38 stores and streaming services. There's no subscription and no fee per release, we keep 10 % of your earnings, and your masters stay 100 % yours. More on our distribution page.
Pass one of these facts on, then get your own song into the stores with OGRECORDS™.