Keith Jopling wrote an interesting blog on the Music Think Tank site recently, about how to market your music. Most of it was pretty sound advice, but one sentence made me choke on my coffee: "If you don't consider yourself to be a 'live act', and you're not Kate Bush, get out of the business!"
I often hear people say that musicians should accept that they won't be making money from their music any more, but that the money they earn from touring will make up for it. When these people are representing companies that gain from the use of music it's particularly infuriating, but they also fail to acknowledge that songwriters don't earn a great deal from merchandise, and very little from their songs being performed on stage.
Recently, I've received quite a few emails from people who used to be in bands, asking how they'd go about getting their old songs recorded by other artists. Judging from the aforementioned opinions – and the dire predictions of the president of the Songwriters Guild of America – anyone with aspirations of being a professional songwriter may as well pack it in, unless they're willing to "sleep in the subway".
Yes, it's more difficult than ever (or at least since the 1930s) to make a living as a songwriter, but it's not impossible. My advice is to listen to your songs critically and try to figure out exactly what artist it would be suitable for. If the answer is Coldplay, Radiohead, or an indie band, you won't be able to pitch it. Even if you think your song is better than anything they've recorded, the fact is they only use their own songs. Instead, you could try to get your recording of the song on a synch.
But what about music publishers? There used to be a time when publishers signed certain songwriters purely on talent, but these days they don't part with any money unless they've got a guaranteed return in the pipeline (which means the writer either has songs coming out imminently, or has had hits that are available for publishing). So you're better off trying to get the song to the artist yourself, than hoping for a publisher to take a chance on your song.
Getting an established artist to record a song you've written is not easy, as many professional songwriters will attest. And even if you get them to record it, it won't necessarily end up on a released record. Even Diane Warren, who's considered one of the most successful songwriters of the last three decades, complained that the song she wrote for James Morrison – which he also recorded – wasn't chosen for the album. Then again, if it sounded anything like the song she and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote for Eurovision, there may have been a very good reason for that.
Great songs are few and far between, but they're the holy grail record companies and artists are constantly looking for. One could even argue that there are more artists than there are great songs. Beyoncé's If I Were a Boy was written by and for BC Jean, a girl trying to make a name for herself as an artist. You can hear her version on MySpace.
Years ago, when I had just signed my first publishing deal, a seasoned songwriter who had hits with Christina Aguilera among others, said to me: "If you write every day, you should consider yourself successful if you manage to produce two or three great songs in a year – even if you've written 60 songs in that time. And, if you're lucky, at least one of those songs will end up on a somewhat successful artist's album." But writing those other 58 songs is what gets you to those two great ones.
We'll find out soon enough if BC Jean has done her homework in the writing department – she now has a record deal with a major label. Does she have another hit in her, or will she have to look for help from the songwriters who spend their days exercising their writing muscle until they produce that elusive classic?
