✊ Hook Stacking: A lesson from Taylor Swift on creating an ultra-catchy show
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1,163 WORDS | READ TIME: 4.4 MIN Hi friends, Good songs are built around a clear, memorable hook. Great songs are built around several. And then there are songs by Taylor Swift. The master of hook writing who brings the craft to another level. Take We Are Never Getting Back Together. In the first 62 seconds, Taylor drops distinct 6 hooks. By my count, the song as a whole has 12, many of them repeating throughout. For Taylor, this was just a warm-up, however. In Shake It Off, she crams 10 distinct hooks into the first 60 seconds, with a grand total of 17 by song’s end. This pattern repeats throughout all of her hits. In each, she layers hook upon hook upon hook upon hook of every variety—melodic, lyrical, vocal, emotional, harmonic, percussive, instrumental, production-oriented, and more. This progressive stacking of hooks results in songs with multiple opportunities to worm their way into our ears, brains, and—often—souls. If the first hook didn’t grab you, the next one—or the one after that—will. But for Taylor, hook crafting isn't limited to her songwriting. As her aura has grown, each album, each distinct, defined era of her story has become a hook of its own. And then there are the subtle winks, easter eggs, and clues for her fans to decipher—meta hooks that Taylor weaves throughout her songs, liner notes, artwork, marketing, and performance. If you’re looking for an explanation to her success, a good place to start might be that she’s simply given us more hooks to latch onto than anyone else. And if you want to maximize your own potential for growth, this practice of Hook Stacking is a good place to start. Like good songs, good podcasts are built around a clear central hook. Great shows, however—shows that vacuum up attention—are designed & constructed atop a stack of them. On its own, any one of these hooks might be enough to attract listeners to the shows. The combination, however, makes the show utterly irresistible. When it comes to podcasting, hooks can be broken into two categories:
Within each category, there are a series of opportunities to create hooks. The more hooks you weave into your show, the more listeners you'll attract and retain. Show Level HooksShow Topic – The topic of any show is one of the foundational hooks, with its sharpness increasing the narrower, more unique, and more distinctive it is. Within the topic, there are multiple potential sub-hooks.
Concept – Stacked on top of the topic is the way you explore it through your podcast, which provides another hook opportunity. The concept hook can be broken down further into two additional potential hooks:
Host – The host of a show can be a compelling hook if they:
Cover Art – Artwork can be a powerful visual hook in its own right when done right. Some of the elements of hooky artwork include professional, interesting, refreshing, unique design, being evocative of the topic, vibe, and tone of the show, being clear, and hinting at (or calling out directly) the show’s inherent tension. Title – Truly great titles are hard to come by, but they can provide a powerful hook for a show. The best titles are often built around a play or twist on a known phrase that is both evocative and refreshing. These titles are linguistically pleasing, tend to roll off the tongue and tell us enough about the show to pique our curiosity and lean in to look closer. The crux of this type of titling is it can’t come off as forced, ham-handed, or trying to be clever… which it often does by all but the savviest of creators. Description – Especially the first line—which is often all a new listener sees in a podcast app—should build on the title and cover art to provide enough new information about the show to further pull in the listener. If the title and cover art are evocative, the first line should concretely lay out the value proposition of the show. If the title and cover art are clear, the first line of the description should evoke something bigger and deeper. Tone/Style – In a space with shows that all feel and sound the same, a show can create a powerful hook by adopting a distinct, clearly defined tone and style. Take the aggressive, blunt, sweary, Everyone Hates Marketers, for example (a show which also has strong cover art and title hooks). Crafting Your HooksOutside of the host hook, any and all of these show-level hooks can be applied to any show. And they should be. Do a search on a random topic in your favourite podcast app and you’ll find that most shows lack even a single strong, compelling hook. Which is great news for you. Because while your show likely isn’t currently making use of all of the potential show-level hooks discussed here, if you’re willing to take the practice of hook crafting seriously, you have an incredible opportunity to stand out. And grow significantly. In a medium like podcasting where listeners typically discover—and recommend—shows as a whole, over individual episodes, the more hooks you can stack inside your show, the better your results will be. What’s more, an abundance of show-level hooks raises the floor of each individual episode within the show. Said differently, with an ultra-hooky show, each episode needs to do less work to hook and retain listeners on its own. Speaking of episodes, we’ll be breaking down episode-level hooks tomorrow. In the meantime, hit reply and let me know one of the following:
Oh, and I'll be updating the full post here if you want to refer back to it in the future to compare your show against. Til tomorrow.
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