The Step-by-Step guide to find your Uniqueness Factor

How can you come up with something that’s even better than what you’ve done before when you don’t know why your bestselling albums were so successful?

Maybe you could do something completely new, but you don’t want to disappoint your existing fans. So you guess it’s best to innovate what made them turn to you in the first place. But you have no clue what criteria made them connect with you.

So how can you find out what the secret formula of your band’s success is?

After all, you deserve to know so that you can make a bigger and better impact on the people who turn to your songs to navigate their own lives.

This is your dream!

This is your purpose in this life.

So, let me show you how you can find out what makes your songs so unique.

I’m a Story Grid certified editor, and I specialize in using the craft of compelling storytelling to help musicians identify the strengths and weaknesses of the lyrics of their songs, and give them specific and actionable advice to follow so that they can improve them.

In this blog post, I will show you how you can find your Uniqueness Factor.

The Uniqueness Factor is the final result of the complete song analysis of your discography that will tell you exactly what the three most important storytelling criteria are and what your fans expect to listen to in your lyrics. 

It will also provide you with a clear picture of what your fans are expecting of what the songs on your album should be about. 

Case Study: Placebo

We will use the seven studio albums of the band PLACEBO (altogether 82 songs) to show the correlation between storytelling and the success of an album to find out what PLACEBO’s uniqueness factor is.

About Placebo

Vocalist–guitarist Brian Molko and bassist–guitarist Stefan Olsdal formed their English rock band Placebo in London in 1994.

Since then, they’ve released seven studio albums, all of which have reached the Top 20 in the United Kingdom, and have sold around 11 million records worldwide.

But what makes them so unique are the lyrics of their songs in which they openly discuss sexuality, mental health, and drug use.

How can we come up with the Uniqueness Factor?

If you want your song to resonate with your listeners, you need to consider your song to be a chapter taken out of a novel or a scene from a movie.

Sometimes a song can even tell an entire story.

Songs are short, but there is plenty of time to capture a moment that changed the main character for better or worse.

And those moments allow your listeners to connect with your song.

If they feel like you understand them, they’ll not only buy your albums, but they will also turn into your fans.

And you can write powerful lyrics that support what your fans love about your songs when you know your Uniqueness Factor.

The five steps to finding your Uniqueness Factor:

Five steps go into finding a musician’s or band’s uniqueness factor. And don’t worry, I’ll talk about each of those steps further down:

1. Analyze the storytelling of all the songs of the complete discography by filling out a spreadsheet that lists the relevant storytelling criteria
2. Check how the song fulfills the storytelling criteria and calculate the average result of each storytelling criteria for each album
3. Create infographics to visualize the results so that you can compare the storytelling result with the success history of the albums or single releases (Sales, Chart Position)
4. Compare each album with the average result of every storytelling criteria. So that you know which album is the closest to what your fans are expecting to listen to on your albums.
5. Find out which storytelling criteria have influenced your success the most by comparing each storytelling criteria from every album with the desired success factor like sales or chart position.

In the following series of blog posts, I’ll explain each step of finding your Uniqueness Factor, and I include the results of my second case study using the songs and studio albums of Placebo as an example to each step.