How important are vocals for you to like a song?

Not very.

Yes

To me instruments and vocal color matter more.

well as long as they aren't out of tune or completely destroying the song i don't need them to sing like an opera singer or something...

competence...that's the word

I need them to be competent at the song

There are songs that may not be anything that special but the vocalists turn it into something amazing, so yeah I pay attention to vocals a lot..

I love when a group can belt, harmonize, coordinate well together.

It is definitely not a deal breaker though, if the song is pretty good and vocals are sub par then I will still listen to it..

What bugs me more are some vocal tones that are very annoying to my ears

Vocal is as imprtant as the rest of a production.

A great singer elevates songs and improve it's uniqueness. The more you listen to a song with great vocals, the more you notice all these littles inflections, runs, tone change you unconsiouly hear but never notice.

well it depends on the song & it's genre. For regular pop songs, I give preference to vocal tone over singing technique. And when it comes to ballads, I prefer the opposite. But I usually don't listen to kpop for it's ballads, so you can guess my pick!

Quote from haesoovoiceship

Vocal is as imprtant as the rest of a production.

A great singer elevates songs and improve it's uniqueness. The more you listen to a song with great vocals, the more you notice all these littles inflections, runs, tone change you unconsiouly hear but never notice.

spoken like a true EXO fan lol

to me vocals can make a mediocre song a good song, but they can't make a good song a great song if that makes sense. Ultimately the melodies are the most important to me, but vocals are there with lyrics/timbre/mixing and the rest tied for second.

Vocals matters, the delivery and the technique. And those skills are there to highlight, enhance a song.

But they don't make a song. Tons of great vocalists can have uninteresting or just not too great songs.

I often have this issue with other stans when they are always about the skills and only the skills like a discography isn't important or rather essential to stan a group or an artist.

So it matters but it's here to make a song better, it doesn't make it good in the first place

Important because there's a lot of song that I like but I can't listen because the vocal was so bad. (usually gg) So, I only listen to the good cover for that . If there's none, then, I prefer listening to the good piano/violin/orchestra cover for the song.

But still melody > vocal

Quite essencial. I sometimes am only listening to a song because of the vocals in it. And plenty of songs have been ruined for me cause of the vocals in them.

Quote from chounim

that's true but i think vocals real importance shows in the fact (at least it is a fact for me) that no song can save bad vocals

Yeah, that's an opinion. Not one I agree with at all tbh.

I think this question has been relitigated ad infinitum on here, but there is, I think, a more interesting thing going on.

Like, upon first listening to a song, people are naturally going to primarily focus on some things over others. I think that's really interesting. I can think of songs that I heard like, twenty five years ago, and there were certain elements that really stood out to me, but when I listen to them now, I barely notice those elements. And I wonder if I could hear them for the first time today, would I notice those elements, or would I focus on the same things I do now?

It seems to me that for a lot of people, at least on AKP, but maybe just in general, the vocals are the main element of a song, and that's the part they focus on when they first listen at least. And that kind of makes some kind of logical sense. What is a "song" if not for a vocal, right?

I'm from an outsider perspective in that my formative years were spent listening to electronic music, and in particular, rhythmic electronic music (techno, dnb). To this day, it's the percussion that stands out to me when I listen to a song for the first time.

And that disconnect is really interesting to me. Like I remember when Ice Cream came out, there were some people that were like, "they should have gone in a more hip-hop direction", and I'm like.. "It's... a hip-hop song, it has very very typical trap percussion". Which it absolutely does, and both the clipped sample and the minimalist hook play into that, but at the same time if I was to focus primarily on the vocals (and ignore the nature the hook), I wouldn't think it had anything to do with hip-hop.

So, like, for me, bad vocals aren't going to ruin a song because they're not even the first thing I notice or consider when listening. They do definitely downgrade them though. Sometimes. Depends on how distracting they are.

in the field of pop music, obviously vocals are more important, but at the same time, I think you're much less likely to hear truly bad vocals. My bar is probably a lot lower than yours in this case, right? I can't think of a single mainstream pop song that has made me go, "ugh, these vocals are absolutely awful". With the possible exception of some of Momo's moments*.

*edit: I lied. Dance Monkey. Less to do with the singing and more to do with the affected "indie girl" tone. Jesus Christ do I hate that song.

Quote from chounim

I think the most important element in music for me is emotions. Unless I'm going to get up and dance (in which case I would mostly only care about the beats) then I mostly consume music either when I'm working (or studying back in the day) or sometimes when I am lying down for the purpose of listening to music, so I care so much for the emotions being delivered and the way they make me feel. I think the most important elements as far as emotions go are lyrics and vocals. Lyrics are likely the most important thing for me in songs in my native language, but in kpop no matter how much many fans insist they stan for lyrics or that lyrics are the most important, I'm too opinionated to take someone else's interpretation of lyrics at face value and then proceed to feel things about it. It's nice to understand what a song is about but translations are nothing but someone else's interpretation that's influenced by their emotions, experiences and thoughts and that's vastly different from understanding lyrics first hand while listening to the song. So all there's left to deliver the emotions here is the vocals.

But to be Frank, this is not a black or white matter. Even I have many songs where I don't focus on the vocals much and primarily like them because they're fun or because I find the beats or arrangement interesting etc etc. It's just that if I am going to stan someone then they better have good vocals for me to be able to enjoy their music in the long run.

I'm talking about something a bit more physical when I say "element", here. As in: The vocals, the instrumentation & and their chords, the percussion, the production. The concrete building blocks of the sound, not the end result, emotional or otherwise.

I'm with you on the emotional aspect, but I disagree that vocals and lyrics are the most important elements as far as emotions go. I actually really strongly disagree with that.

Edit: And I also really disagree with the stance on translation. To me that's like saying you can't really get any emotional response from Madame Bovary unless you read it in the original French. I mean, for sure, music is more real-time than that, so you're hearing Korean in the moment. But definitely reading the (translated) lyrics to a song make it connect. Even if the translation is bad. Even if it's a machine translation. The intent usually comes through.