Make your own song

There are two types of songwriters, amateur/hobby and the professional songwriter. The amateur songwriter does not take business seriously and would like to write for fun. The professional songwriter write for profit and take business seriously.

When we write music for fun, sometimes we forgot that we already wrote many songs. And sometimes after many days, we forgot the chords, lyrics, melody, the date it was written and other details. This type of situation is not dealing business seriously. In this way, it is very hard to market songs that is lacking with details.

The solution for this is to develop a professional catalog of songs. It is very easy and it saves you a lot of time and effort in the future as you progress in making songs. This gives you full control in your songwriting business. Assuming you have a personal computer at home, the following are requirements/tips on how to build your catalog offline.

a. Dedicate a single folder in your computer named like “Mr. X Song catalog”
b. Make 3 folders inside your “Mr. X Song Catalog”, the 1st folder is for audio file storage (like MP3), 2nd folder is lyrics (in notepad or word file) and 3rd folder will be dedicated for business documents.
c. Then for your audio file storage, record all your songs in cassette recorder and transfer it to your hard drive. Use filename as title of the song for easy tracking.Compress it to save disk space.(example storing it in MP3 128Kbps)
d. For your lyrics, have one notepad for every song you have written. Remember to put the lyrics and chords in the file.
e. The 3rd folder is for business documents where you can put the copyright related documents, royalty statements, performing rights societies passwords and related documents.

After completing the above requirements, it is the time to develop a master control file. The master control file is where at one glance you can see everything in your catalog, including song titles, songwriter info, date written, date of copyright and others.These master control file has links directly to your important documents and files.

You can present the master control file using MS Excel with column headers containing your important data. Below are the important things to include in your master control file.

a. Date written
b. Title of the song
c. Songwriters of the song (that includes you and maybe a collaborator)
d. Name of the song original performer
e. Copyright status
f. Performing right song registration
g. Audio file/version of the performer
h. Lyrics and chords

In the future make the spreadsheet flexible so that you can add other important data such as pertaining to mechanical royalties and others.Below is a sample screen shot of the master control file catalog. This can be uploaded to Google spreadsheet for better online usage.

The key to a successful professional catalog of songs is easy usage and easy access of files/information.

When you have some little budget or you have less than 30 songs written, you can avail those free hosting of files such as http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/ which can host up to 1 GB of usage space and a bandwidth of up to 4 GB.

This could be big enough to host some of your songs online.

Building a professional catalog takes many years to fully developed from the time the 1st song is written to your 100th song maybe but with the use of the computer all of your years hardwork may gone in an instant if you would not provide a backup.

I suggest to have an alternate backup saved online or in DVD Gold disc. Backup all songs and data because computer problems will happen anytime.

If you done with your catalog, it should look like below:

To describe briefly above, the catalog at one glance displays all the information regarding every song (the title, songwriter, performer ,copyright registration and performing rights registration).

In the future, columns can be added like US Chart or any preferred chart rankings as well as royalty earnings. These are very useful information to track the hits (well performing songs)in your catalog and will be able to maximize the income from it.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 1:57 am and is filed under Music Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.