Make your own song

This bill of rights will surely protect any songwriter from any means of depriving the rights to earn money from the songs we wrote. I received this info from ASCAP via their newsletter. It makes me sad though, a lot of music related companies are fighting to reduce copyright rates for which they are earning money well from the songwriters hard work. (more…)

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. (more…)

It is very important to know what are the songs in your catalog are hits. This is vital for commercial songwriting success. The difficulty is we do not know how to measure the songs hit potential. Until music technology evolves and there are pioneers in this technology attempting to measure the song potential and give a quantitative measurement if the song is a hit or a crap.
They call this “HIT SONG SCIENCE“, and the tool can give assessments quantitatively if the song can be a hit. They do it by comparing the qualities of the million dollar released hits. The official website for this (you can try to avail their services, it was free before) is www.hitsongscience.com. I have tried their services last year it was great, it was free that time and I hurriedly upload my songs. (more…)

It starts with a dream. You listen to your favorite songs and artist. Try to play guitar and write songs. Form a band, then do local gigs. You try to cover as many songs as possible. You then try to go to studios, do some rough recording. And when the band are on the way home, you then talk to each other that someday, the band will be famous. You then planning to give demos to every key person in the music industry. The band then dreams of having a million dollar beach house, filled with parties and chicks. And finally dream of having an enormous bank account consisting of band royalties.And you think you are most likely to succeed.

The truth is, no you are not. Frankly speaking, music business is so HARD. The reason why it is hard because in the first place:

1. You do not study about music business:This means you do not know the protocol in the industry. Even how good you are, you end up being nothing. A great general will never win a battle without knowing carefully the battle territory.

2. You do not write songs seriously: Hit song statistics in a song catalog consist only of small percentage. Let say realistically 20% are hits (following the famous 80-20 rule, 20% of your songs will give 80% of the songwriter income). So this means the band needs to write at least 10 songs SERIOUSLY to have 2 hit songs. Do not fall into illusions of writing 100% hit songs, it is simply illusional and impossible.

3. No originally or creativity: If I were an A&R, I will try to sign an artist that sounds original. This means all songs, lyrics and image should be unique at the same time can be classified into a genre. The problem with indie artist is that they know cover songs more than their original songs. It is a sign of weakness. It is because, original songs is a bread and butter for every recording artist and it should mastered with heart.

4. Do not have enough live experience: Frankly speaking, do not fall into illusions that you will land a deal without doing a live concerts, do some but do not overdo. Remember you are a recording artist. Artist that are marketed through recording, this means you will to spend time working in studio. But without doing a live concerts in your career, is again a sign of failure. (more…)