SONG CONTEST BLOG

It is with deep sadness that I inform you that Henry Gaffney passed away on May 23, 2010 after a courageous battle with lung cancer.

Henry was one of my songwriting professors at Berklee College of Music, and a We Are Listening panelist.  Above all, he was a friend and mentor.

In tribute, I intend to keep his profile and image on our website.

He will be missed.

This is a guest post by Dave Kusek

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.

In his book Songwriting: Essential Guide to Rhyming, author Pat Pattison writes:

Occasionally when I’ve asked writers what rhyming dictionary they use, some have been indignant, as though to say, “I do not cheat.  I am self-sufficient.”  Others have looked at me sadly, as if hoping that someday I will abandon my artificial crutch and get in touch with my creative inner self.

Use a rhyming dictionary.  This is one place where self-reliance and rugged individualism is silly.  Finding rhymes is almost never a creative act.  It is purely mechanical search.  On those few occasions where it is creative (finding mosaic rhymes, for example), a rhyming dictionary can still stimulate the creative process.

The self reliant writer who thinks  rhyming is a spontaneous expression of personal creativity can usually be seen gazing into space, lost somewhere in the alphabet song, “discovering” one-syllable words.  This “alphabet process” is certainly at least as artificial as a rhyming dictionary.  Nothing about it is creative or pure, nor is it spontaneous.  The worst part of it is its inefficiency.

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I’d delighted to announce the addition of Kristen Cifelli to the We Are Listening team.

A schooled musician and seasoned performing songwriter, Kristin will be joining our Artist Development division and heading our song critique service.

Kristin took the music scene by storm in 1999 with the release of her debut album, Silver Bowl, to critical acclaim, earning her a Boston Music Award Nomination.  Her second release, So Long My Love, brought her increased notoriety, with a Nomination for Best Album and a win for Best Song (“Show Them”) in the Independent Music Awards in 2006.  Early in 2002, Kristin contributed her song, “Martyr”, on the Sony/Heavy Rotation Records compilation, Shekinah 13 Artists, which celebrates the diverse female alumni of Berklee College of Music. The compilation is being distributed by Sony/Epic Records, with part of the proceeds going to help young artists at Berklee College of Music. Upon the release of Shekinah 13 Artists, Kristin was featured on the Oxygen Network’s Daily Remix, VH1’s Jump Start, Billboard Magazine, Boston Globe and the Associated Press.

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Topspin, the enigmatic media technology company “dedicated to developing leading-edge marketing software and services that help artists and their partners build businesses and brands” has combined forces with Berkleemusic.com, the online extension of Berklee College of Music, to provide music marketing courses for artists and music promoters to master the Topspin direct-to-fan marketing strategy and dedicated technology tools.  The first online course, Marketing your Music with Topspin, available exclusively on Berkleemusic.com, is slated for release in September 2009, with course enrollment beginning next month.

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We Are Listening’s first web-based newsletter client was Constant Contact, a fiddly system with customer support reps reminiscent of US immigration officers.  Geared toward corporate email marketing and communication, the company boasts a huge client-base and offers a 60 day free trial with restrictions.  After one year, we moved to Emma which I loved!  Their user interface is gorgeous and they clearly invested into attractive newsletter templates and superb design features, albeit the most expensive web-based newsletter service I stumbled upon.  Customer support was also fabulous.  In fact, I remember sending a newsletter out about an up-coming trip to Nashville and one of Emma’s reps picked up on it and invited me to visit their offices in town.  Nice, huh?  With Emma, you have to pay set-up fees rather than enjoy trial runs but, if you can afford it, the service ? and its savvy team ? will consistently add value to your marketing efforts (from my experience).  Mad Mimi is my most recent discovery.  If we had not developed our own newsletter system last year, that’s where I would invest my newsletter marketing dollar today.  From the outset, the service is uber cool and does away with unnecessary features.  It’s easy to use and looks fantastic.  One of the founders, a charming South African bassist by the name of Gary Levitt, attended Berklee College of Music with me.  In a recent conversation, he seemed pumped about Mad Mimi’s commitment to a “sensible”, no-bull web service that’s both design conscious and user friendly.  Mad Mimi is cheaper than Emma and offers a “100 contact free trial”.  I recommend signing-up and playing with it.  iContact is another consideration and seems to be making a splash at the moment.  Offering a 15 day trial limited to 250 subscribers, the service is not as attractive as Emma or Mad Mimi in terms of design but appears to be easy to use and boasts excellent email delivery rates and server reputation.  Apparently, 9% of the company’s client-base is in the music field.  MailChimp, which I haven’t tried but I know is popular, positioned itself as a flexible service, advertising its Free Starter Plan as “perfect for bands, little league teams and groups with tiny lists”.  I’m not sure what the differentiation is but I like the UI.  I shall investigate further…

When I first arrived in Boston back in 1996 to begin my studies at Berklee College of Music, I had preconceived notions about the process of songwriting.  Like many ‘natural’ songwriters, I felt that songwriting came from within; free from form, rules, or a specific discipline.  I decided to major in songwriting and began to study its craft in the commercial sphere.  During the span of my four year degree, I picked up specific songwriting tools and strategies to make songwriting as much a professional discipline as an intuitive recreation.  Songwriting is as methodical as it is artistic.  Or, rather, ‘professional’ songwriting (i.e. songwriting for recording artists, radio jingles, television etc.) is as much a professional craft as a vocational talent.  For fledgling songwriters, I highly recommend an in-depth revision of ‘successful’ songs from the last two or three decades.  Whether it’s “Yesterday” by The Beatles or “Yellow” by Coldplay, I am confident that you will find patterns – tried and tested songwriting principles – that will guide you when you craft your songs.  Once you have a number of songs you feel good about, go out and get as much professional feedback as you can.  Try entering a song competition too (if the organizers provide an assessment service).  Remember: the record industry is founded on superb songwriting because that’s where the money’s at!