Music Business

There are two common types of songwriting publishing deals that publishers make with writers. But, you don’t have to limit yourself to those two options if you can think outside the box.  Here are the two common types of deals plus some ideas for creative options: 1) Staff Writer Writes exclusively for one publisher. Has…

WAY too often, I run into people that have been taken advantage of in regard to paying for a song demo. So, I wanted to give you all the info you need to answer the question of what should a song demo cost. Here are several demo scenarios you might find yourself in… You write…

We get lots of questions here in “town” that relate to the economics of songwriting. I’m going to break down some of the basics of song splits and help explain WHY things work the way they do. Song splits in my pro writing world work like this… We always split the song equally among every…

Every week I see determined hardworking songwriters flocking to pitch to publisher events to play their songs for publishers. I see whole businesses existing on this model of setting up pitch to publisher events. I’ve seen it for 25 years! While there might be some networking potential to find co-writers, etc, I have not heard of…

Today’s music business life lessons are about letting go. Last week when we were trying to go to Spain, my wife and I got to the airport at 9:45 AM. Our flight was supposed to leave at 12:20. We got a little snack and waited at our gate. As luck would have it, the trouble…

Now that a number of SongTownians are getting songs pitched and some of them are being put on ‘hold’, I wanted to talk about what a hold means and how to act when you get one. First of all – what is a hold? A hold is when an artist or an artist’s representative asks…

My first publisher, Kim Williams, was an inspirational person in many regards. He taught me many powerful lessons about writing AND about life. Kim had been an electrical engineer and had been burned over most of his body. He spent over a year in the hospital and wasn’t given much chance at survival. When I met him, he…

These days there are more ways to make money with music than you might imagine. These are not always huge money makers, but they can provide significant income if you get enough songs recorded in these areas. 1) Internet soap operas. I have a friend who made several thousand dollars in one day by selling…

One of the biggest areas in which Clay and I see songwriters being scammed is in the area of pitching songs.  There are untold numbers of services that will GLADLY take your money to “pitch your song”.  But here is the truth about pitching songs… There are two big reasons that this pitching songs arena…

5 Songwriting Scenarios… Recently, we had a lively and awesome debate in the private SongTown Masterclass page on Facebook about whether or not a “track guy” (Or girl) should charge their co-writers for building a track/demo for their song.  There truly is no one right or wrong answer to that question.  There might be times…