Does the music you MAKE sound like the music you LIKE? It’s very easy to make music the way our tools want us/let us work, rather than bending those tools to sound like the artists that we’d hear in a cafe and ask to know who it is. It’s always good to have a specific reference track to compare yours to.

If you have a favorite artist or artists, research everything you can about how they get their sounds. Borrow song structure tricks — most people struggle to turn loops into songs, and your favorite artists probably do this well.