Old Town Road is a ‘Country-Trap’ song that reached the Country charts, was then controversially removed by Billboard and then, topped the Billboard 100. All within the same year of it’s 2019 release.
Beyond the controversy and the marketing, this song has a huge amount of careful engineering inside its 2 minute playtime. This has made the tune an internet sensation, and caused it to become a brilliant ear worm that has garnered over a billion plays on Spotify alone.
Lil Nas X was able to leverage Internet Culture, Genre Bending, and Great Songwriting and Arrangement to create one of the most memorable songs of the decade.
In this video, Robert gives you 4 ways that Old Town Road defines pop song structure and arrangement for 2020 and the next decade.
Old Town Road is a song that treats each section as a shareable meme within itself, keeping the section length under 15 seconds to fit into the format of Social Media sharing, It keeps the overall length of the song so short that if you enjoyed it, you’ll be tempted to replay the song to feel like you got the full experience.
When you replay the song you are greeted with that familiar chorus in 12 seconds, which is perfect for nursing that millennial attention span. The bookend intro/outro technique makes that replay transition absolutely seamless which creates an infinite loop of danceable Country-Trap swagger.
But the success of this song was no accident, Lil Nas X pushed his song on social media full time with an arsenal of memes that spawned into compilations on TikTok and Twitter of this evolution of country culture. Even with the backlash from the Billboard charts, this song is an unstoppable juggernaut, that leveraged internet culture, genre bending, and great songwriting to create one of the most memorable songs of the decade.
