It Ain't Just The Song, I Think...

When the idea first arose to write a new Steelers song that would take over airplay and steal popularity from the current one, it really seemed at the time like it was all about the song. The song is what you hear and what people respond to, it seemed. And if the song was good enough, why wouldn't people love it, want to buy it, want to hear it played at the stadium, etc? That all makes sense to me, still. There is, however, a new paradigm that's been opening up to me as I have gone down this road of HOW we get our song to replace the old one. And what I've come to realize is that it can't be just about the song.

Do a simple search on the Internet for Steelers Fight Songs and check out how many different songs are out there! As I have said in earlier posts, I was totally oblivious to any other songs except the old Polka song and the one that gets played all the time now-a-days when I wrote "This is Steeler Country." I had no idea there were hundreds of songs out there.

The risk in writing a new song and especially in branding it a "fight song," which I initially did and sometimes still will for the sake of getting my site ranked higher in Google, is that it immediately puts it into the camp of all the other people out there who wrote their own fight songs. So, you may tell someone you wrote a new Steelers song and they think to themselves, "Yeah, I wrote one of them fight songs, too. Never got any airplay." The immediate assumption is that you've done something hundreds of others have done and that yours is destined for the same trash heap of old Steeler Fight Songs that everyone else's ended up on.

But I really think we've done something unique here. It's not a typical Steelers song and it should be considered as typical of some of the bad songs that are out there. So, we have to differentiate it from all the others and the way we do that is by all of the supporting content I have been trying to "imagineer" over the last few weeks.

While things like Anatomy of A Rooney don't directly relate to selling our song, they do very much in a "sneaking in the back door" sort of way. In like manner, yesterday I thought of doing a video series called "The Yinzer Diaries" -- short videos with ridiculous and/or obscure jokes and filled with non-sequiturs. Or an interview show hosted by Hal Hollywood, a character I made for a Murder Mystery Dinner I attended back in the winter. (The character went over quite well all evening and I've always wanted to do something else with him.) Short-sighted logic may be screaming "Why are you doing all this extra stuff? Concentrate on the song!" Well, the song will be totally done soon -- likely today is the final mix. Unfortunately (in some ways), this is only the very beginning.

The odds of a song, even a very good one, catching on and taking off and replacing what is currently so ubiquitous is not that good if the song is all there is. To really do what we've set out to do, massive action is required and a plan must be put into place that makes a phenomenon out of the www.ThisIsSteelerCountry.com site. If we don't, our song goes in the dust bin with the others.


GET THE SONG HERE:
www.SteelerCountrySong.com