Your feedback has been tremendously valuable.  Thank you!

We’re pushing ahead with the Song Contest Score Card concept and it will look something like this:

Considering that each score card will require our judges to do a little extra administrative work, I wanted to ask you this:

In addition to your song contest entry fee, would you be willing to pay a fee for an accompanying Song Contest Score Card?

And if so, how much?

Leave me your comments please…

What are your thoughts on MySpace Friend Adders?

Would you pay for this?

Leave me your comments please.

Again and again, I have heard this sage advice when asking producers, label executives, and publishers about artist development.  Take your time.  The first and most important thing to do is to get the music right: love your music, immerse yourself in it, and live it.

As an artist/writer, your coin of the realm is your songs, and they need to be great, polished, and professional.  The worst thing you can do is go to market too soon.  Without careful preparation, practice, understanding, listening to others, testing your material, developing its quality, and crafting and articulating a unique story to tell, you will probably enter the marketplace too early and will most likely fail.  Start out slowly.  Practice.  A lot.

Another critical component of artist development is live performance.  Any venue will do to get started.  Play the smallest clubs to get used to performing and being in front of an audience.  Everybody gets better over time, and live performance in front of a crowd does many positive things for your career.  When you play live, you develop sets of songs that you play and expand your repertoire.  Don’t be afraid to play other people’s material mixed in with your own.  Covers create a sense of familiarity that you can use to build your audience.  You are also learning by playing the songs of other great artists.

Performing live helps you build your confidence and song quality, lets you interact with an audience, and experience their reactions to your songs.  Also, when you play live, you can test out different material and approaches to your songs.  You can experiment and find out new things about the song, tempo, bridge, chorus, lyric, etc.  You can see which songs are the most popular, what should be the rhythm of your set, where the audience loses its attention, and how best to open and close a show.

Live performance and touring is a major cornerstone to any artist’s career and is one of the best ways to develop an audience.  Over time, your audience will grow with you as you refine your art.  Superstars Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, James Taylor, Paul Simon, and countless others all played small clubs for very minimal dollars at first, refining their approach, music, and brands to small audiences that grew over time.  Just look at the size of their audiences now.

Many successful executives have told me that good music finds an audience and is very difficult to keep under wraps.  If you want to have a long career in the music business, take a good look at yourself, who are you, and the package that you bring to the table.  Do you have the songs, do you have the talent, do you have the charisma, and are you really ready to go to market?  Develop, refine, write, practice, play live, listen, and collaborate.

Listen To Others

Great artists and writers take the time to develop, but they also listen to people around them who they can trust to give them feedback and keep them honest about what they are trying to do and how well they are accomplishing it.  This is role of the A&R person, record producer, publisher, and artist manager.  You simply cannot believe your own press and expect to be successful.  You also cannot rely on your mother or family to be objective about what you are doing. You need to get honest opinions from a lot of different people who will tell you the truth.  Listen carefully to them as a sounding board for your career and ask hard questions like the following: Do you like my songs?  How do I look on stage?  What do I need to do to improve?  What advice can you give me?

Your fans are the ultimate source of feedback.  Set up a blog or some other means of creating two-way communication. Encourage people to tell you what they think.  Hand out postcards at your gigs, collect your fans email and cell phone numbers, and ask them what they think of your set, your songs, your performance, etc.  Don’t be afraid of what you might hear, and use the feedback to learn, refine, and further develop your brand and music.

Collaborate

Having a band is a great way to collaborate, and hopefully you will find other musicians to play and write with at various points in your career.  Another hallmark of great artists and writers is that they work with different musicians to write songs, perform together, cover each other’s songs, and most importantly learn from one another. Collaboration and the exchange of ideas are the life-blood of creative artistry.

Collaboration does not mean that you are joined at the hip with another artist forever.  You can move in and out of collaborative partnerships when you need something new to spark the creative juices or just get you going in another direction.  Working with other talented musicians can be a challenge.  Quincy Jones has great advice for when you walk into the studio to work with other artists.  He says, “Check your ego at the door.”  Find people you can work with, who you enjoy being around, and who make you feel good.

There are many examples of great songwriting collaborations, including Holland, Holland & Dozier, Lennon and McCartney, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin.  The list is long.  Don’t be afraid to cowrite with other people or to record other songwriter’s material.  This can help you reach a broader audience, develop your talents in new directions, and potentially open up your brand by association with other great artists.

One of the most successful songwriters of the last 30 years is Don Henley of the Eagles.  He talks about identifying your strengths and weaknesses through collaboration with great writers like Jackson Brown and Glen Frey, and being willing to put someone else’s songs on your record if they are better than your own.  Seems to have worked for him.

Many of the most successful songs of all time have come out of collaborative partnerships that were organized on a formal level at some of the songwriting factories of the past, including the Brill Building, Motown, and Philadelphia International.  Collaboration helps you to stand on the shoulders of others and to peer over a horizon that you might not be able to see on your own.

About The Author
Dave Kusek is the Founder and CEO of Music Power Network and Vice President at Berklee College of Music.  He is also the co-author of the best selling music business book, The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution.

Today, I discovered that the service (as we know it) is down for good.

Posted on the SellaBand website:

On Friday February 19th, SellaBand AG requested provisional suspension of payments (moratorium).  This was granted by the Court in Amsterdam on the same day.  Yesterday, Monday February 22nd, this moratorium was changed into bankruptcy, with appointment of, Mr Paul Schaink, an amsterdam lawyer, as trustee.  The trustee wishes to inform the ‘Sellaband community’ that, apart from a few technicalities, the completion of a transaction with a potential buyer of the business, is to be expected soon, in order to make a fresh start, safeguarding both the rights of Believers and Artists.  More news will follow shortly.

On behalf of the trustee,

Johan Vosmeijer
CEO SellaBand

Now, when you enter The Singer/Songwriter Awards, our flagship international song contest, you can include the lyric to each of the songs that you enter for The Lyric Writer Awards, our lyrics-only song contest… in one click!

When you’re filling out the song contest entry form, below the lyric field of the song you’re submitting, you’ll see this:

For an additional $20, would you like enter the lyric to song #1 for our lyric writing contest?

Hit YES if you do.  NO if you don’t.  It’s that simple.  And so much more convenient than before.

Related Posts:
9 Must-Read Posts About Song Contests
What A Song Contest Can Do For You
Song Contest and Critique Status Manager

This is what a new online service called Headliner is trying to do by offering 10 Band Bucks for access to each of your fans.

You can use your Band Bucks to purchase access to other artists’ fans with your promotional message.

If you accept another artist’s offer to send a promotional message to your fanbase, you earn more Band Bucks.  Think of it as a cross-promotion between you and like-minded artists.

It works on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace by linking your profiles to Headliner’s network.  Private information is never divulged and email lists are not shared.

Simply compose a promotional message, select the artists in the Headliner network that you wish to promote with, and Headliner does the rest.

Visit the Headliner website for a video demo and let me know what you think by leaving your comment.

For the first time, when you entered one of our song contests or purchased a song critique, you had total control over your entry and insight into the review process.

No other song contest provides this kind of data, security and functionality to view, edit and store your most valuable assets: your songs.

Now, I want to take things one step further.  And I need your help.

When you receive your Final Status (i.e. Winner, Finalist, Runner Up, Not Selected), I want to include a Score Card.

At the moment, we don’t have a standardized method for “scoring” entries.  I want to change that.

What are the individual elements of a song that you think we should score?

Leave a comment

It’s a statement.

For BMW, the “German Engineering” stamp is impervious to Lexus.

For Gibson, “Made In The USA” is just as sacred.

It takes decades to establish the reputation that Gibson has achieved.

Yet only minutes to flush it down the toilet.

Gibson, like many heritage brands, engaged itself with a young spunky marketing consultant that dazzled its management team with social media catchwords like “viral”, “buzz” and “tweet”.

How the conversation went down:

Spunky Consultant:  “You’re doing everything wrong.  Everything!”

Gibson Management:  “We are?  Sales are up.  Overhead is down.  What do you mean?”

Spunky Consultant:  “Sales Shmales.  It’s not about the money, it’s about your brand equity!”

Gibson Management:  “Sales Shmales?”

Spunky Consultant:  “You want to connect with your fans, engage with your customers and create a conversation around you, see?”

Gibson Management:  “Will that increase sales?”

Spunky Consultant:  “Forget sales already.  I’m going to get you buzz.  You do want buzz, don’t you?”

Gibson Management:  “Does buzz increase sales?”

Spunky Consultant:  “Look, do you want followers or not?”

Gibson Management:  “I… guess… that… we… do…”

Spunky Consultant:  “Great!  Make the check out to…”

So what happened the next day?

Gibson launched a new website that displays each of its exquisite instruments in the light that they deserve.  Best of all, on every page of the website, beneath the featured instrument, they included threaded comments (like on YouTube) where visitors can comment on the featured guitar and the community can vote the comment up or down.

This is spunky, dynamic, web 2.0-ish online social media marketing at its finest!

Except for one thing…

The most popular comments, those that received the largest number of votes, make Gibson look like a Buick, not a luxury premium.

One comment in particular, truly struck a chord with me.  Here it is at No. 1 with 452 votes for the Gibson Les Paul Dusk Tiger:

I can see the salesmen at Guitar Center now: Salesman: “Hey man check out the new Gibson Dusk Tiger! It’s got all of these amazing features!” Customer: “It looks kinda stupid.” Salesman: “Yeah but it tunes itself! You can dial in any tone you want on this baby!” Customer: “Can you dial in a less stupid looking finish? My band will laugh at me if I turn up to a gig with that thing” Salesman: “It only comes in the one color, but it’s LIMITED EDITION! There’s only gonna be 1000 of these made!” Customer: “I think it’s a limited edition because there’s a limited market for these things. Even then I doubt that there are enough guys out there wearing the leather pants, wolf t-shirt and eye makeup necessary to look as stupid as this guitar. And those guys usually don’t have $4000 to waste on what is basically a gimmicky Les Paul dressed as a gay tiger, so you’re going to have a hard time selling these, aren’t you?” Salesman: “Like you would not believe”

Where do you think Gibson went wrong with its online marketing strategy?

Leave me your thoughts please.

In the email announcement and on their blog, they celebrated a decade of success stories by their song contest winners.

Among the Top 10 USA Songwriting Winners Of The Decade, the likes of Kate Voegele, Ari Gold and Darrel Scott were mentioned.  I’ve never heard of them either but check this out:

Kate Voegele (2005 song contest winner) appeared on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien performing her song “99 Times”, a Billboard Adult Top 40 Hit, peaking at #24.  Her album, “A Fine Mess”, was released on Interscope/MySpace records and made the Top 10 on The Billboard 200 Albums Chart.

Ari Gold (2007 song contest winner) hit #10 on the Billboard Charts and #1 on Sirius OutQ with his winning entry.

Darrell Scott (2005 song contest winner) pitched his song and got it cut by Faith Hill in 2006.  Wow!

Do you think these artists would have achieved such success had they not entered The USA Songwriting Competition?

Leave your comment

With timeless classics such as “Wind Of Change” and “Rock You Like A Hurricane”, The Scorpions have been selling out arenas for longer than I’ve been alive.

Tell me this: How did such a shit rock band make it so big and for so long?

With a tenure just shy of The Rolling Stones’ and a decade lead on U2, it’s clearly not a fluke.

What’s their secret sauce and where can I get me some?