I thought I'd take a little break from recording my album to interject my perspective on this matter.

All feedback you get on your song is helpful, but you always have to take into account who is giving it and to what extent it is "compromised"

If you get feedback from your auntie, you have to take into account she is your auntie and is going to look upon your work in a more favourable fashion, which compromise the integrity of the feedback. If you pay someone, it may be compromised because the pro-critic person wants you to pay them again in the future, so will tell you a couple of things to improve your average song, to make it slightly less average.

I personally wouldn't ever pay anyone to critic my songs, because I understand the game I'm playing better than they do, so I don't see how they could help me. When getting feedback on sites like this, I'm interested most in the areas I know are my weakness. Mixing, drums, bass etc. I think if you are a serious songwriter, you have to have some areas where you have total certainty about the quality of your work - be that lyrics, vocals, melodies or whatever. If you're putting songs up for feedback uncertain of anything at all, then you're not in control of the game your playing, and your songs probably aren't that good.

If I were gonna pay someone to critic my songs, I'd expect comments on every aspect of the song, melody, harmonies, quality of the mix. But it seems to be the case when people pay for a pro critic that the lyrics are usually pinpointed as a weakness. This is because lyrics are the easiest thing to critic, even a layman can make suggestions to change the lyrics. But the reality is, most average songs fail on a musical level, and that's much harder to quantify and rectify and takes a far higher level of skill. And making a few changes to lyrics rarely does anything than make an average song slightly less average.

Lucian