MUSIC INDUSTRY BLOG

Alexandria Maillot came in first place in Round 3 of The 2010 Singer/Songwriter Awards for her song, “All We Need”.

Constructive criticism welcome by leaving a public comment here.

I received this email this morning:

Hi.  My name is XXXXXXX.  I was wondering if we could maybe strike a deal.  You see, I have no money because I am not famous yet.  If you can help me become famous, then instead of giving you 30 dollars, I will give you 500 dollars!

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“Lior, I couldn’t be more grateful for the connections you made for me with Beth and Jon.  I signed a contract with Imaginary Friends this week, and also talked to Jon.  I was nervous to work with both of them at the same time, but Jon called Beth yesterday.. and everything will be working out fine.  Jon will be pitching my music to MTV and ETV! and Beth will be licensing for other TV networks.  Jon says there are new shows opening for June, and placements will happen really quickly.  I will let you know if I have more good news!  Thank you so so much.”

- Hee Young

MusikPitch offers free song contests for songwriters.  Simply select a free song contest and submit your songs.  There’s no cost to take part, it’s a great way to get your music heard, and there’s a cash prize for the winner.

Browse Contests >>

Look For Clues

Gaining a significant edge in a song contest is sometimes as simple as knowing where to look.  Most song contests publish a wealth of information about their contest judges right on their websites.  Each judge’s professional profile may contain clues as to what type of music is most likely to draw his or her attention.  You can use the data to accurately assess your chances and formulate a strategy by looking at which artist, publisher, label or music supervisors the judge is presently working with, then use that information as a guide to crafting a song that is ‘in demand’.

Look For Patterns

Most song contest websites stream previous winners’ songs.  Take time and listen to a few winning songs and you will probably be able to see a pattern – a songwriting style, genre or topic – that appears to capture the judges’ attention time and time again.  Use this valuable information to your advantage when deciding on which song you’re going to submit for a song contest.

Write Like A Pro

If you’re including a lyric with your song contest entry, it should not read like a page from a book.  Format your lyric so that each section of your song is clearly labeled (e.g. Verse, Chorus, Bridge).  Use a line space to separate each section of the song, upper case letters to highlight hooks and new sections only, and never include chord changes, notes, or copyright information unless they are specifically asked for.

Clean Up Your Act

Though your song contest submission doesn’t need to be professionally produced, you will be marked down if you’re not hitting your notes, your instruments are out of tune, the band’s not in the pocket, or the recording is inaudible.  Make it easy for the song contest judges to truly enjoy your songwriting by eliminating poor performance and unprofessional presentation.  Be masterful and your music will shine.

Focus On The Song

Song contest judges are professionals and won’t be swayed by awesome production centered around a mediocre song.  When choosing which song to submit for a song contest, focus on the song itself, not the bells and whistles.

Put Your Best Foot Forward

A song contest is not a science experiment.  If you want to improve your songwriting, purchase a critique first.  Otherwise, participate in a song contest as if you’re pitching your best material to a label, publisher, music supervisor or event by submitting only your most polished songs.

H. Jay Carney, winner of Round 4 of the 2009 Lyric Writer Awards, has completed his professional co-writing prize with the distinguished songwriting duo, Pete and Pat Luboff.

Listen to the result:

“Soul On Strings”
by Pete & Pat Luboff and H. Jay Carney

© Pea Pod Music and The Carney Company, Inc.

The song contest prize for the Lyric Writer Awards was designed to put aspiring lyricists in the hot seat with the music industry’s top songwriting professionals.  The song contest prize includes an intimate co-writing session, a complete overhaul of the winning lyric (if necessary), and a publisher-ready demo of the song performed and recorded by some of Nashville’s most sought after musicians.

Congratulations to Jay, Pete and Pat for writing an outstanding song together!

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, Future Hit.DNA, author Jay Frank establishes that:

The rock fan that likes some country is more apt to like country that tends to have a hint of rock to it.  This could be a country based artist who produces his songs with a bit more electric guitar, such as Keith Urban, or it could be a rock artist who tiptoes into country waters, like Bon Jovi.  A traditional country fan may like these artists, but he might not readily acknowledge them as bona-fide country performers.  Yet to a rock fan, they become as country as Garth Brooks.

Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” is the perfect example of a song that really went out of its way to contain elements of multiple genres.  At its heart, it is a clear and simple pop song.  The rhythms, however, are club oriented, and lean toward Latin beats, specifically a light version of Reggaeton.  Producer Wyclef Jean’s intro and brief raps, accented with a sample from the classic hip-hop anthem “Déjà Vu” (Uptown Baby),” tie her neatly into the hip-hop world.  Put it all together, and you no longer hit just one element of Shakira’s fan base, but nearly every potential fan.  With no other songs exploiting these relationships to this degree, “Hips Don’t Lie” easily became the most-played song of 2006.

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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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For his prize, Vincent Robert Trocchia, winner of Round 3 of The 2009 Lyric Writer Awards, joined forces with We Are Listening’s songwriting duo, Pat and Pete Luboff to polish his lyric, set it to music, and produce an outstanding demo.

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Learn more about our lyric writing contest, other songwriting competitions, and song critique services.

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