Music Business

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…

Over the years, I have made a lot of mistakes that hurt my career chances in the music business.  And, I’ve observed a lot of people crashing and burning because of miscalculations in their own music efforts.  So, I thought I’d write about 5 of the big ones as a cautionary tale for those of…

We get the question all the time “Why won’t a signed staff songwriter write with me?” Most people are surprised to find out that the answer is economic and not personal in nature. Here are the economics of why staff writer’s are hesitant to write with unsigned writers: 1) Other unsigned writers who have gone…