Hey everyone! I make instrumental music with mostly no lyrics, and I'm struggling to name my songs. I want them to have names in my own language (spanish) but also feel like having song titles in english could be helpful in reaching new ears. What are your thoughts on this? Do song names' language affect your interest in a new track or not?
#About song titles, language and reach
frank narwhal
signal cosmos
I don't necessarily have any issue with a song not being in English, but I definitely feel like I'm more likely to click on, remember, and recall an English title, particularly when it comes to playing music over something like a Google Home.
wide iris
English titles do have an overall effect on clicks which is one of the reasons a lot of people who typically speak in other languages still use them. The English speaking crowd is far more likely to click on song titles they can read rather than not.
crystal anvil
It's easier on something like Spotify since you can just like stuff/add it to your playlist, but yeah if there's not an easily-relayable way to describe your track it might affect how well it can be shared, although direct streams might still be fine
Just based on my experience people are able to get around this somewhat with songs in Japanese here and there for popular stuff like Vocaloid, but even then a lot of stuff will take off using fanmade translations, or the eventual official romanization - stuff being popular in the form of its transliteration doesn't appear to be as common
frank narwhal
Yeah I had the same example in mind. The titles of my demos are in spanish, and I thought for my debut LP I'd keep spanish song titles since my previous releases are in spanish but maybe I'll try english titles and see if it's better that way 🙂
Since the songs are instrumental ambient tracks the title is not that important lol
crystal anvil
yeah I've had stuff get added into my spotify-for-artists' radio that's had titles in exclusively chinese, so shorter instruments are probably totally fine depending on your intended audience
the only big pop song I can think of where I've seen it listed as either is that jennifer lopez' waiting for tonight is also in Spanish as una noche mas