There’s a popular concept in economics called the 80/20 rule. It states that 80% of your total efforts produce 20% of your results and 20% of your total efforts produce 80% of your results. This means that, out of all your labor, only a small amount of what you do accounts for your best results. When applied to songwriting, it means that 2 out of every 10 songs that your write are better than the other eight. The concept can be further narrowed to 85/15, 90/10 and even 95/5, but the base ratio is 80/20.

If you accept this principle, then you can see why many albums have 1-3 hits and 8-12 songs that are usually referred to as filler. Most bands seem to operate under the idea that once they’ve written 10 to 15 songs, they have enough material for an album and head into the studio. They record their songs and put out their record and that’s that.

For proof of how the 80/20 principle works in this respect, head over to your CD collection and take a survey. How many CDs do you own that you only like a few songs on? Be honest. How many CDs do you totally love as a whole?

A great example is Guns N’ Roses. Many consider their first album, Appetite For Destruction, to be a classic, while their follow-up, Use Your Illusion I & II, has pretty much been forgotten. When some accused the band of changing their sound for the Use Your Illusion records, the band countered that most of the songs from all three albums were written at the same time.

There are 42 songs between the three albums;

- 12 songs on Appetite For Destruction (29%)

- 30 songs on Use Your Illusion I & II (71%)

While both albums had hits, the biggest hits of the band’s career were on the first album. We can assume that if all of the songs were written at the same time, the better of the songs were put on their first album to have a strong debut. The vast majority of GNR fans will agree that Sweet Child ‘O Mine, Welcome to the Jungle and

Paradise City are their best songs**, all of which are on Appetite For Destruction. This accounts for 7% of the 42 songs, and illustrates the leverage of this principle.

Now there are some amazing songwriters that write better songs with more frequency than others and other songwriters that are completely tone deaf, but these people are the exception to the rule.

The average songwriter can benefit from this by using the ratio as a guiding figure. If you were to write 100 songs, 20 would be great, 80 wouldn’t be as good; therefore, the more you write, the more good songs you’ll produce. Don’t fall in love with everything you write, as this is the trap that holds most bands in the depths of obscurity.

Writing more songs will make you grow as a songwriter and let you experiment. Even if you know that a song that you come up with isn’t that good you should finish it anyway. Get it out of your head so you can move on to the next song. The more you write, the more good songs you’ll produce – just remember the 80/20 rule.

Now get writing!

** This is confirmed by the iTunes download counts of the total GNR catalogue