I know hardware synthesizer enthusiasts love their ambient experimental techno or w/e (and believe me I’m no exception) but sometimes a masterfully produced pop song satisfies like nothing else. It’s just so fun and versatile. In the club? In the car? At the beach? In the shower? Just got dumped? Pop will always come through. If I had to pick one style to work in for the rest of my life that would be it. Curious to hear everyone else’s takes 
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I like writing pop songs. But I can’t say ‘radio-friendly’, because I don’t like the sound of current radio pop. The current production style/s of radio pop give me the shits, with the exception of the occasional hip-hop track that still has a little bit of rawness/life/surprise in it. I’m kind of hoping that pop mores will change (they always do) and end up somewhere where I can produce music I like that is also popular.
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I’m with you on today’s pop, i don’t think it’s been this bad in a while. I mean radio friendly in a broader sense, like lately I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from mid-late 2000s pop, people like britney, gaga, timbaland, kanye etc
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Pop is such a wide term.
I love the beatles. I probably hate 90% of number one hits in the last 20 years.
The current edm whatever influence in dance pop tracks makes me shudder
Say my answer would be no I guess 
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Some pop songs out of the hip hop genre are amazing, remember when Timbaland so banging them out, sooo good! Would defo like to make his beats
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My band ‚None of Them‘ gets played on the radio sometimes.
Therefore you could say it’s pop by definition. We see ourselves as post-post-everything.
2000 pop I like…? Kelis? No Doubt?
Timbaland was avant-hiphop.
Ps. The biggest mistake is to imitate what everyone else is doing.
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i try to do modern “dark” rnb with an electronic tinge (james blake, weenkd, fka twigs/shlohmo/jacques greene/stuff i listened to in like 2010-2013) despite listening to solely rap and musique concrete/lowercase/noise for the last 6 years. so that part is tough, trying to recover the natural rhythm and sense of melody i had since i used to drum as a teenager
its extremely counter-intuitive to do using strictly hardware and single stereo takes rather than multi-tracking into a daw, but it is fun and i like the warm ultra-glued saturated (lofi) sound for such a pristine genre. and i like the challenge
i wouldn’t want to make straight up pop, but i like the idea of making popular rnb with a creative edge
I have a natural affinity to come up with cheesy earworm hooks… and I love applying it on a very basic synthwave loop.
An example I threw together today with my OP-1
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I’ve made a few poppy tracks. It’s hard. I have a hard time making concise music so squeezing a track into 3 minutes is a real challenge for me. I do kinda wish I had a good singing voice though because I really want to make a super polished synthpop album or something.
But yeah. Good pop music is an artform. I know there’s a lot of trash out there (especially recently where everyone tends to latch on to the same rhythms and chord progressions) but I think it’s essential for an experimental / weird musician to have an appreciation of at least some era of pop music as a reference point / contrast / inspiration. Some of my favourite music has been where weird shit introduces elements of pop.
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I wouldn’t say I make or enjoy pop music. Although I can understand your sentiment.
I share some of it in that, while I can admire a lot of the ambient complex synth music for the musicianship and technical ability to construct it it’s just not something Id try to make.
Although I don’t listen to a lot of pop music what I need in all my music bet it indie, punk, dance etc it needs to have a hook. Now and again I can listen to other stuff but 95% needs a hook i resonate with or I’ll never return.
The same goes for my rubbish own tracks, if i can’t find and muster up a hook I’ll never bother finishing it or enjoy making it.
This is probably about as poppy as my electric music gets:
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…does radio still count in these days of uberdiversification…?
payforplay times are over…heavy rotation on air has lost most of it’s power…
charts became a joke long time ago while the streamingplaylists do their job by now…
but hell yeah…as much as i hate those songs that only were made to be instant earsugar with nothing but cheese written all over, i love those catchy songs that are truu and innovative pop pearls…
while all tracks better sound like…err, simply good…in a common sense of radio sound/friendlyness…
well produced that way that they could be aired anytime…anywhere, anyways.
if we are honest to ourselves, we all know, what that means…a track that just sounds properly done, whatever genre they’re aiming at, coming from or leaning to…
that’s what makes me saying, no common hw only set up will ever get u there…
it needs the proper mixing desk, the know how and at least that final daw treatment to finish ur production…anything else is good fun but not truu pro…
and sorry, but whenever ur “just” into some kind of fancy underground techno…even then, once u need to translate that to bigger soundsystems u gonna fail big time, if ur production did not cross that level beforehand…
ur lowend, ur lowest octave has to be nailed…ur low mids need to cleanded out and defined properly…ur mid range must be clarified and ur airband needs to fit accordingly…
while ur overall clarity and loudness approach must be able to compete…
no way around it…
no matter if ur into indie, punk, techno, sugarpop, rock, heavy, edm, industrial…
only those who matched with “radiofriendly” were able to become hits…to become pop!
most music that aims to be “radio friendly” is monominded middle of the road…
and gosh, i hate that…
while pop can be everything, that gets some kind of hook and feel translated to U…
and yes, me too…i love it, if a song can do that to me…catch me, if u can…
sometimes even one of those hitfactory traphop tunes, that are all over the place these days, can do that trick…rarely, but happens…
while the worst that happens way too often these days, are those “zombie must be a hit, since it it was a hit once already” trax, always coming from the cheese lab of some a&r agent sucking out on some major backcataloge…one…more…time…
once, repetition made hits, nowadays, repetition only makes futher more profit…
uuuuuaargh…
but hey…there’s only bad music…and good music…
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I agree. I’d like to see the concept of ‘radio friendly’ taken further. In the 70s through the 90s it seems like there was plenty of room for artists of different persuasions to stretch out and occupy the ‘pop’ space in their own way. It was a big tent. Sometime in the mid 90s the focus narrowed down a bit. But it could be that the tent really hasn’t shrunk, it’s just that the record companies have tried to more aggressively define ‘pop’ for their own purposes. Anyway, the immediacy of radio friendly music is still appealing.
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I have about 15 3-minute pop songs written, but every time I try to find a singer they flake on me
I’ve started gravitating towards poppy song writing and my solution for not being able to write lyrics or sing all that well is to vocode/speech synth gibberish 
If it’s good enough for K.K. Slider it’s good enough for me.
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Yes, I try to because that’s the stuff I grew up listening to. I don’t like and don’t listen to ambient/experimental/noise/glitch stuff because I find it so boring and self indulgent; give me a melodic hook any day of the week. I suspect I’m in a very small minority around here but that’s okay.
As others have said crafting (and that’s what it is) a pop type track isn’t easy but it’s deffo worthwhile, thinking about the interaction between different instruments and finding a way of fitting that jigsaw together within a short snappy timeframe is great fun imo. Anyone can twist some knobs for 8 minutes but it takes a different level of skill and understanding to write pop.
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Although I agree writing pop isn’t as easy as people think, I don’t think it’s fair to then turn around and put down other peoples music or musical taste.
I so agree! I love it. I love to use my Octatrack to build pop songs. Love love love it. There is nothing like building catchy melodies that bring a bit of sunlight into people’s lives.
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I’m not criticising other people’s taste, just saying it’s not my taste.
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Radio friendly doesn’t mean much music wise these days with countless online stations such as NTS pushing the bar. If you mean, produce pop music: I don’t. Not because I hate pop music, but I find it boring to make with sequencers that offer extremely sophisticated tools that just don’t fit in pop music.