Yesterday, I shared the raw experience of releasing Children of Summer – the hopes, the struggles, and the quiet disappointment when it didn’t quite catch on. Despite that, I was determined to keep creating. My third song, Tonight was a tougher beast to conquer. I experimented with more unique melodies, but soon realized they were drifting too far from the modern Eurodance genre. Eventually, the chorus for Tonight came together, and then the verses. I wrote lyrics about the joy of finding harmony with someone special after a long time spent alone.
I poured a tremendous amount of time into the arrangement. I recall drawing inspiration from DJ Bobo’s “Pray,” but I also really wanted to inject a little organic sound into the track. When my older daughter performed with her music school in Berlin, it sparked an idea: the harmonica would be the perfect extra spice for the song.
A New Voice, A Modern Blend
I pushed myself to draw more inspiration from slightly newer EDM tracks, focusing on improving the fills and transitions between sections. This gave the song a more contemporary song structure. The chorus is softer, and I built in an instrumental drop after the chorus, making it the song’s peak moment. This is quite different from the typical 90s music routine, yet I felt strongly that I wanted to blend this modern approach into my sound.
I found a very talented singer from Australia on Fiverr who also happened to be of Hungarian descent. She quickly understood my vision for the song and delivered a perfectly recorded vocal. Her voice was powerful, almost operatic, and someone on SubmitHub even compared it to Disney songs – which, while perhaps not fitting the style perfectly, I believe might have given the song that extra boost and generated interest.
The Unexpected Breakthrough
The song was released in October last year. I followed the usual routine of sharing it everywhere, and then, honestly, I put it out of my mind. I’d occasionally check the Spotify Artists portal to see how many people were listening, but I was completely used to seeing the “0 people listening now” message. Then, suddenly, about three weeks after the song’s release, I saw it: 8 people listening simultaneously. Then 16. Within a few days, I had hundreds of streams. What happened was that, for some reason (which I still can’t understand or reproduce), the Release Radar algorithm picked it up, and Spotify started recommending it to people. Within a few days, the song reached the magical 1000 stream mark – the threshold above which Spotify starts paying for streams. A few listeners even added it to their own playlists, and I started gaining active listeners – people who would specifically search for and play my song.
This gave me a huge boost in self-confidence, and I truly felt like I was moving in the right direction as an independent music producer. The song now stands at nearly 5000 streams, which, of course, isn’t a massive number, but it was previously unimaginable for me. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, I still don’t know what caused this specific surge, and I haven’t been able to reproduce even a fraction of it.
I was convinced that every new song would now experience this same success. Sadly, that wasn’t the case, and it disheartened me a bit again. Nevertheless, Tonight holds a particularly special place in my heart because of this unexpected success.