It seems that nothing is more important in business these days than being able to adapt quickly to changes in tastes, technology and other influences, such as the economy. And the music business not only is no exception, it is practically the poster child for a business whipped by changing times. Musicians, composers, songwriters, are just cogs in the machinery of the culture, and more things are affecting us everyday.

The delivery is the thing

Soon Apple’s Tablet will probably force us all to rethink music marketing once again (except for those farsighted enough to have been thinking about it for some time now.). The specifics will come out in the wash, but we know now that every new way of providing content, as we are fond of saying in this age, produces new challenges and promises new profits. The challenges are guaranteed, but the profits can be elusive.

It is said in legal circles that a lawyer who defends himself in court has a fool for a lawyer; doctors tell you that it is difficult for the best diagnostician to take care of him or herself. There is truth in this, and it applies to all of us. The issue here is a lack of objectivity. It is easy (relatively) to be objective about someone else. That is why, often as not, someone else can write a better press release about your new CD than you can. By extension, marketing your music, taking a long hard look at it can require another pair of eyes, ears, and with luck, another brain to analyze it all.

What I am getting at is the need for musicians to work together or to work with other people in some fashion. Someone who is dtrong in a field where you are weak can be more important than a collaborator or agent. You trade off work and viewpoints. Sounds downright communal, doesn’t it? But perhaps the day of the rugged individualist going it alone in an era of corporate marketing might be all in the past tense. Certainly there is room for the rugged individualist in music, but only if that person doesn’t might being an outsider in the world of success. Only if being an individual is better than being better known for your music and wealthy (ier) than the other kids on the block.

Knowing the turf

I confess to a bit of confusion about the culture I live in at the moment—the United States. Why anyone would watch reality television is beyond me. (Why anyone would watch television is beyond me, but that is another story.) Why anyone would by a CD by someone who won a staged contest fails me. It is supposed to be about the music.

The important point here is that I don’t know the turf—the rules, the motives of customers for the product. And the fact that I don’t understand it doesn’t mean anything at all, except that it is more of a challenge for me to market into that world than it will be for someone who lives in it. Common wisdom tells you that if you want to sell music to movies, you should be watching lots of them to get to know the trends (and hear mistakes as well). But what if you don’t like movies?

Understanding marketing and understanding how to reach people who live in another universe are quite different things.

Using what you learn

I could whine about fate; say that good music should find a niche, but that is useless and pointless. In this case, the music serves a specific cultural need. And this is a critical bit of information for me. If I attach my concept of success to getting music into reality television that I refuse to watch, then I need to connect and work with someone who does understand the attraction of the medium. Otherwise I just play a huge guessing game. You see, adapting to the environment doesn’t mean finding out how to sell them what I do, so much as figuring out what they want and giving them that with my own spin on it.

Just as I wouldn’t pitch a 15 minute classical price for a film scene in a jazz club, I need to understand how I can apply my skills and talents to what is needed in the market.

Alternatively, I can write and produce whatever I want, and be content with the knowledge that some pieces might find a home eventually, but that my standard for success has to be in the quality of the music I create.

It doesn’t matter much if you are talking about performance or licensing master tracks—the issue is the same. If the music you play doesn’t get people into the club, you will stop getting into the clubs as well (or the clubs will go out of business, which can be even worse).

So, if you are having trouble marketing, check your ability to adapt, whether it is to the new content delivery systems, the trends, or something else. If you can’t fix it yourself, it isn’t the end of the world either. You just have to be flexible.

If you’ve found a better path, I’d love to hear about it.

If you write songs in the hope that you will get them recorded by artists who might actually sell some CDs or downloads, or get airplay (all of which can make you money), then the first step you need to take is to do some market research. This is the business of songwriting we are dealing with, not songwriting itself. I am going to give you some tips for beginning to develop your understanding of the market you are trying to break into it.

Bear in mind that, because you are pitching your songs to industry pros, it doesn’t matter much what the listeners think of your songs. That might sound weird, since they are the ultimate consumers, but you are once removed from them. You need to impress and wow the trend setters, not the trend followers. Doesn’t matter if you write country or hip hop, you can’t be writing songs that should have been on the radio last year and sell them this year.

Let’s assume you know what genre your songs fit into. Unhappily (for songwriters) genres are moving targets these days, so even that step means staying in touch with the current labels. For instance, the reality is that Motown R&B hits don’t have much in common with what is currently called R&B. But if you’ve got that base covered, let’s move to the next step.

• Look at the charts. Pitching songs requires knowing what songs and what kind of songs within the genre are getting airplay. In pop, ballads work for some artists but typically the hits tend to be uptempo. Does that still hold? And what tempo is uptempo?

• What vibes are popular? Are the songs within that genre downbeat or positive? What values do they promote—street rioting or family values?

• Are the newer artists following the trends or breaking new ground?

• Identify the singers who sings songs that you like. Do they cover a variety of styles or promote one style? Are the lyrics in your face or subtle? Are the themes personal or universal.

The intent here is to find out how you will fit into something that is alive and ongoing. The music business is alive and vital. It might not be as profitable as it was, and there are certainly new business models, but it has always been in flux. Think of it as a merry go round. You have to watch it a bit before you successfully jump on board.

That is step one. Once you’ve got this information, the next step is going to be pitching it. We’ve talked before about tip sheets and collecting this sort of information, but the key point is getting the information. If you don’t have the money for tip sheets or to join up with organizations that can help with placements, you are not up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Google is your friend. With a little creative effort you can find ways to get songs to artists you’ve identified in step one. So pick an artist and:

• Find their producers

• Find their management company

• Find their record label

These are the key players in determining what gets on a CD. So go to the web sites. Often you will find songwriter friendly submission links, or instructions on how to get your material to them. You might find an email address or mailing address. Now is the time to move slowly, however. Don’t email a gigabyte of mp3s. Don’t just mail a CD. Use the contact information to send a short note about yourself and ask for permission to submit material for a specific artist. Keep the note concise—no one cares where you went to school—and friendly. Make sure the language is good English. This isn’t time for text messaging. You are supposed to be a lyricist and that means understanding that while “Yo” might work well in a hip hop tune, it still is not English. No, that doesn’t mean that good English produces good songs—just good impressions. And initially, that is the entire point. The rule here: Make it easy for them to say yes.

If you are invited to submit music, you will need your demo and a typed lyric sheet. Make sure your contact information is everywhere—in your email, on your lyric sheet, on the CD… Folks don’t mean to be careless with your email address, but they are busy and you are not that important yet. Make things easy for them. So this rule is: Make it hard for them to lose you in the shuffle.

Even if you’ve done your homework and gotten permission, odds are you will never hear anything back. That isn’t necessary a reflection on your music or your research. It might be bad timing, the person is no longer connected with the act, or any number of things. In this industry, few people bother to say no—they just ignore you.

So you move on to the next one. And that is probably always a good rule. Move on to the next one and work with the willing.

As a songwriter, your main activity should be writing songs. Sure that sounds obvious, but there are so many activities that can distract you that sometimes actually writing songs gets the short end of the time allotment. After all, there are forums where you exchange information on songwriting techniques and business information, instruments to practice, new computer programs to learn, maybe gigs, and amid all that it is kind of nice to have a life as well. But in the end, it is songwriting that you are there for. And the product you create is your catalog.

The nature of your catalog depends entirely on you–your taste and skills. But there are some components that you should address. First are the various versions of songs that you should be creating. As we’ve discussed, if you are selling through libraries, then you are creating the “broadcast quality” recordings, whether you pay to have them done, or do them yourself. But consider the multiple uses of a song with video. Your song might be a theme song for a drama. Fine, but often, because the music is partly responsible for setting the mood, filmmakers like to have instrumental versions of the song to use elsewhere, subtly recapturing that mood. That means you need to have instrumental versions ready, and preferably in the library already. Some libraries will link the various versions of a song together. To increase the marketing possibilities, if the lyrics are right, consider having both male and female vocals. The storyline of a movie or television show can suggest a preference for one or the other. (Having both versions is also useful when pitching songs to artists.) If the song contains an instrumental hook, then short instrumental version could be useful. Consider 30 second, 45 second and 60 second cues from the recording.

If you work in a home studio, then you can do all these with fairly little effort. If you use an outside studio, it is good to think of them in advance. If you have to go back and ask for different versions, life can get expensive.

Once you have the song in its various forms, you need to do some paperwork. Being able to pitch a song correctly, or even loading information for a library database, requires more information than you might think of at first. It is a good idea to collect the information while it is fresh so that you don’t spend time trying to recall if that bass note was played by a tuba or a trombone.

Naturally, you are going to need the title and the duration of the song (and each version). You will need to determine its genre. Unfortunately, this can get tricky because different libraries use different choices. Some are rather broad (country, jazz, rock) whereas others will have terms you’ve never even heard of (“Jamaican techno salsa”). But you need to get your brain around a ballpark genre. Or maybe you work in only one area, like dance.

You will need to note information on the vocals: What language? Male or female (or duet)? You will need specific notes on the instrumentation. Although sometimes “rock band” is enough, sometimes the fact that the lead is a synth or a crumhorn makes a difference. Is that metallic ding from a set of bells or kalimba? It can matter if you suddenly see a call for rock music that feature crumhorn and kalimba. And such strange things do come up.

You will need to know the tempo of the song. Some libraries want to know the range, but some want the precise beats per minute. You will usually need to specify moods that the song conveys using word lists that go on forever. You will also, very importantly, need to say who the song sounds like. Is it a tune that could have been on a Beatles’ record? Or Stones? Coldplay gets a lot of requests lately. Often supervisors search on that first, so give it careful thought, even if you aren’t actually thinking in terms of your tunes as replacement songs.

My suggestion is that you create a form that contains all this information and fill it out when the song is recorded. Marketing your work is tough enough without having to generate all the information on the spot. And if you do nonexclusive deals with multiple libraries it will save you a lot of time in the long run. Then you can also note on the form which libraries are marketing the song for you and where you pitch it. Stick them in a loose leaf binder and its there when you want it again.

A recent comment on this site suggested that singer/songwriters had a better chance of success than a pure songwriter. It seems appropriate then to take a look at that notion.

You can group songwriters as performing or non-performing. A performing songwriter is one who pursues performance as part of his or her career. They make recordings of their own material, maybe done a few CDs. Typically they write material that suits their own act in terms of the lyrical message and musical styles. Many folk singers, hip hop artists and so on fall into that category. Many performing songwriters have developed a home studio that lets them, either alone, or with a little help, create quality recordings.

Other songwriters are not focused on their own performance abilities—but that doesn’t mean they can’t craft great songs. But it might mean they create songs they can’t perform, since their focus is on styles they enjoy writing in, or on writing for the top performers already out there.

Non-performing songwriters are more likely to make use of demo studios to take the song to that next level. Even if they have a studio, they are more dependent on finding artists who can make demos or high quality recordings of their tune.

And this presents an interesting tradeoff. The performing songwriter with a home studio can easily crank out a demo, or modify a song for a specific opportunity. But that flexibility often means spending more time dealing with microphone placement, recalcitrant computers, instruments, and technical issues than songwriting. The non-performing songwriter might have to come up with money to pay a studio and musicians, but has no maintenance issues and no technical learning curve. (Take a look online at all the forums dedicated to helping people deal with these challenges for an idea of their scope.) Mixing and mastering are careers in and of themselves.

But what will work well depends on you. So let us look at the pluses and minuses of each approach for a variety of issues that songwriters deal with.

Quick response. Due to the nature of film and television, many opportunities to place songs come with very tight deadlines. Here the advantage goes to the performing songwriter who can quickly put something together, especially in a home studio. The non-performing songwriter needs to continuously build a strong catalog that will mean material is on hand when it is needed.

Responding quickly to create something different is a double-edged sword, however. If you aren’t regularly producing a particular type of song, trying to do one on a moment’s notice makes it difficult to get it right. Each genre and song type comes with a pretty extensive list of things that are done and not done, and they must all be learned.

Diversity. Being a professional songwriter means being able to move with trends and changes. If you write for yourself, then you can adapt easily and quickly, but it is harder to be objective about your efforts. It can be difficult for a single artist to function well in a broad range of styles. The songwriter who works with a demo studio or outside artists can more readily produce a diverse catalogue of tunes, using singers and musicians with the appropriate sound. Instead of producing “ Me Singing The Blues” and then “Me Singing Country” you can get songs produced that fit right into the radio playlist for the genre.

Getting what you want. Theoretically, if you are a performing artist, you can capture the song the way you want it, and present it in the best possible light. Of course, in practice that is only true if you are an exceptionally good artist. Otherwise, the songwriter who uses a professional demo studio might actually have the edge.

This analysis can go on indefinitely, but the point is that the answer is always: it depends. It depends on how you want to spend your time and money, how good a performer you (or your band) really are, how versatile you are trying to be, and whether your focus is getting your songs placed or promoting yourself as a performer.

Some of us walk the line. I have a home studio and record some of my music, use other musicians and artists, use other studios, and keep looking for new ways to improve the quality of my catalog. Why just the other day I bought yet another guitar and if it doesn’t make me write better songs, well it can’t hurt any.

When I first read Kavit’s blog on writing a business plan I felt that he had touched on a vitally important issue. Most people in the music business don’t spend the time working out a business plan, especially individual artists. His ideas were sound, but for me it had two flaws: the audience and the fact that it is called a plan.

My concern was that he realistically addressed only one group within the music community—artists who are selling recordings to the public. I call this consumer business, because they sell direct to the consumers. Songwriters, especially nonperforming songwriters, I felt, couldn’t take advantage of a business strategy that concentrated on building a fan base and promoting concerts.

My second issue was that is a plan. I prefer strategies. An old Hebrew adage says: “Man plans, God laughs.” I don’t like to be laughed at, so I develop strategies.

Kavit’s response was to suggest that I write a marketing strategy for songwriters. So I am going to look at the four elements that he addressed in his original piece, convert them into a songwriter business strategy, and provide ideas suited to business to business marketing, where a songwriter licenses material to people in the business who package it with videos, or games, or on an artist’s CD or downloads.

To make this strategy effective, write things down as you go. Paper and pencil make it all more tangible. For each section you will need to make a list. Then your strategy will evolve directly from a very simple set of principles.
1) Identify the things on the list that are working
2) Identify the things on the list that are not working
3) Do more of #1
4) Do less of #2

Here we go.

OPERATIONS—your activities

Your operations are all the things you do in your music business. Typically they are divided into two flavors: activities that make money and those that don’t make money directly or immediately. What work related activities does your typical day include? Make a list and see if you can sort them into the two categories.

Activities that are necessary, but that do not produce a profit are pretty clear. Accounting comes to mind. Tracking your songs is another. But what about songwriting? There is no immediate profit. Arranging? Same thing? Talking to a producer? That is networking, unless you are discussing an actual deal.

In general, which activities are moneymakers is less clear for a songwriter. Certainly if you are asked to write for an artist, or are commissioned to score a movie, those would be good examples of work that contributes directly to the bottom line. But other things are murkier. For instance, putting songs in a library is done in the hope they will produce income, but it won’t be immediate, and it isn’t certain.

Nonetheless, the list will help you take stock of how you spending your time. Obviously putting finished songs into a library is closer to the goal of dollars in hand than practicing your instrument or registering songs with your PRO.

If you are new to the game, there might be nothing in the money earning category right now. That’s okay. If you have had some success with getting certain kinds of music into libraries, then list that for the time being. You will have to determine how to evaluate whether you are spending your time in a businesslike manner, or shuffling papers.
Business to business work is often one slippery step removed from the cash register.

MARKETING—how you reach customers

Before you can attack this item you need to define who and what you are. Are you hoping to score movies, write songs for artists, place songs in movies, write instrumentals for background…? Maybe you aspire to all of these.

So let’s break this into two large chunks: writing for artists and writing for film/tv placement because the positioning defines what group of customers you are going to chase.

To get to artists, your customers are really producers, managers, and record labels (A&R people). For film/tv, they are music supervisors, music libraries and filmmakers.

If you are after artists, you will need to pick a genre, and learn everything there is to know about it. For film/tv, you need to learn what works for video, and how to make the job of music supervisor easier. You’ll need to learn to create cues and various mixes of your music.

So make your list of things you are doing to market your music, and evaluate each item in terms of whether it makes sense in helping reaching your customer base. Having songs on iTunes, or spending lots of time on a web site, for example, does little in terms of your business objectives as a songwriter. Your audience is not typically looking for a strong web presence. They require commercial songs and instrumentals—good demos and master recordings. Contacts with libraries (who often feed leads to their composers) can provide a direct channel to your customers. A working relationship with a producer can lead to work for artists.

When making your evaluations, be tough on yourself. If you aren’t, the industry will be.

FINANCIALS—how you spend and make money

It is difficult to estimate income from songwriting unless you have a large catalog of songs that are generating income. Initially, every dime you make is windfall profit. The only effective financial strategy is to look at the various sources of income as they develop and, to repeat our fundamental strategy, do more of what works. If a library places one of your dance tunes, write more for them.

Your outgo you can control. And you have to. The biggest problem you face is the endless variety of services (see my blog on that subject) that tap into you for $5 for a submission here, and $10 there. You can spend thousands of dollars very rapidly on submissions. And there are often annual charges as well. My advice, try one or two services, tip sheets or whatever that seem to fit your marketing strategy. Get samples of their leads and make sure that they are mostly the kind of customer you are looking for. If one doesn’t produce, move to another. When one doesn’t work, try to learn why. When possible, listen to the music that beat yours out.

Most libraries don’t charge you to submit. Listen to the music that most of them have on their sites, and look at the placements they have made and see if you fit in. This should be an instinctive part of your ongoing positioning.

In short, control the money you spend. You might find it more profitable to save your marketing dollars for studio demos or musicians to help you prepare your product. Look at the list of places you spend money, and (again) flag the things that have worked and those that haven’t.

ACTION ITEMS

Now it’s time to reduce all these lists to a single strategy. Take them an create one master list of things you will do and not do..

Bear in mind that songwriter is a numbers game. If you are extremely lucky, writing one or two songs might make you rich, but successful songwriters typically write hundreds of songs and keep writing hundreds to stay successful. If you write for libraries, then volume is especially important. You need inventory, and you need the education that comes from writing and producing and placing music.

In the beginning, you might have a goal of writing songs that get better critiques or get accepted by fussy libraries (not all are). You might try a new genre or a new technique. But ultimately, an important action item is to get more songs to more customers. Improve your odds.

Your list should consist of active sentences, such as: “In three months I will have produced three new original tunes, created 30 sec, 45 sec cues from them and placed them in libraries.” Or “In six months I will have pitched my country songs to at least 10 artists.” Make sure that the actions are things you can control. It is useless to write: “I will place 14 songs in movies.” There might not be 14 appropriate opportunities that come your way. But you can write fourteen songs that would be great movie party songs, or club tunes. Remember that this is your strategy, and that means it is about what you can and should accomplish to reach your goals. Beyond these you have to have a little trust in the universe.

Be sure to include the lists from the other sections. “I will spend less time doing x and more on y” for each section are clear action items.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT
Once you’ve gone through this process, you can heave a sigh of relief and get started implementing it, but keep your lists and comments. Put your master list where you can see it every day. Remind yourself that these are goals you have set for yourself, to achieve your own goals. How strict you are with yourself depends on how important those goals truly are

In a year, make new lists, and THEN drag out these lists and see how you have faired. Did you accomplish your action items? Did you cut back on the wasteful tasks and do more of the ones that generate income? And evaluate the results. Perhaps you judged things wrong. Things that seemed like solid, constructive approaches can fizzle out.

Bear in mind that this is a template for a specific (defined by you) kind of success. If you don’t meet all the goals, don’t carry out all the actions, then you haven’t succeeded in following your strategy. And that isn’t the same as failing.

This is my approach, and I will be going into more detail on most of these topics in the future. In the meantime, let me hear you thoughts. Have I left anything out that you are dealing with, either well or poorly?

As a clever songwriter, you probably work hard to get the right title for your song. If you are pitching it to an A&R person or someone else connected with an artist, this is very important. The title is often the first impression anyone has of your song. But, if you work with music libraries, you might find there is a factor at work that can throw all that creative effort out the window.

Let’s go back in time. Suppose you are young songwriter of some success named Henry Mancini and you just finished writing a song with Johnny Mercer that is called “Moon River.” In that era, a filmmaker might hear it on the radio and decide it was the perfect song for his movie. So he picks up the phone (no email yet) and contacts your publisher and the record company to secure the rights to use the song and the master recording. In filling out the cue sheet for the performance rights organization (PRO), the music supervisor would nicely put in the title “Moon River,” and everyone is more or less happy.

Now jump ahead. You are Hank Mancini, grandson of the writer of “Moon River.” Of course you call yourself “HMan,” and you have just written a soon to be urban classic, called “Blood Streets.” You’d like to get it in a movie. But these are different times. No music supervisor or filmmaker has ever heard of you. Naturally that just shows their ignorance, but it also represents the difficulty of trying to get noticed when everyone else is trying to get noticed too.

So you turn to music libraries to help you make the necessary connections. Now, since you don’t really trust one library to work its butt off trying to place your song, you’d like to put it in several libraries. That means you want nonexclusive contracts. No problem. Nonexclusive deals are almost as common as songwriters (“common” in the sense of everywhere, not in the sense of, well, “common.”).

But this is where the trick comes in. Suppose you have deals with Library A and B. Library A, being hardworking, better connected and hungrier, gets your song used in a low budget horror flick (congratulations!). They represent negotiate the rights to your version of the song, and the song itself and all is well. Except…

The problem is that when the song is listed with the PRO, the library usually will have dealt themselves the publishing half. But so has Library B. And maybe you already registered “Blood Streets” with HMan Publishing, just in case you cut your own deal. And Library B might get a deal for another project. So your song has three publishers. So when the horror flick gets shown, how does the PRO know to give the publishing money to Library A? Simple. Library tells the client that the song is called LibA-URB209045. Charming, right? They register the title with you as the songwriter and themselves as publisher. The cue sheet will use that title. (Don’t worry, they’ll probably get it right in the credits.)

So life is sweet. But technology might come along and make it less pleasant. Heard about digital watermarking? It’s just one approach to automating the process of identifying the songs that are played on the air and Internet. And there are lots of geeks busily working on more methods. But they all share one minor problem—your song always looks the same, no matter what title is used. They can’t distinguish between “Blood Streets” and LibA-URB209045 for one single reason—they are the same thing. The same recording is doing several jobs.

This might present a few problems.

There are other arguments against retitling, as this is called, but this one seems to me the most worrisome. Many songwriters won’t do retitling deals. Some won’t do any nonexclusive deals. But nonexclusive is the norm, especially for up and coming songwriters. Getting exclusive deals requires either a track record or some pretty magnificent material (and a lot of patience to connect).

So if you run across a retitling situation, that’s why they exist. What you do about them depends a lot on you. Right now I can’t offer a solution, but it is a situation you need to keep your eye on.

A common question about marketing music is where to send it. How do you find the people who are looking for music? The answer varies, as does the quality of leads you will get.

Let’s talk about tip sheets. Tip sheets are there to tip you off. They announce music placement opportunities. An artist needs a country song that isn’t too country; a movie needs a tune with the same vibe as the Rolling Stone’s “Satisfaction,” or maybe just a party song that kids 18 to 25 would be listening to at college. Whatever information the client provides is what you will get.

Tip sheets come in various flavors and colors. There are online tip sheets, many of which are associated with songwriter groups, such as SongU . There are tip sheets that are tied into some paid service (you have to be a subscriber of their service), such as Sonicbids, Broadjam, or Taxi , that submit songs for you. Typically you will pay something to be a member and then a fee per submission. (Taxi screens the submissions, and even though you pay, they don’t submit anything that doesn’t meet the standard for the placement. They say that helps them maintain credibility.) On a regular basis they post the opportunities and you find that ones that you think are best for you. Typically you won’t get contact information for the client unless you are selected—if then. These services don’t want you going around them, because that is how they earn a living, and furthermore, most of the clients want it that way. You can go to the web sites and see what sort of listings each has. Taxi will happily put you on their email list and send you the listing every month. These are the same listings that members work from and provide a clear idea of the information that is provided—you just can’t submit until you join.

There is a lot of debate over the viability of these services, and although they can look similar, each is quite different in what it offers. There are several other services using a similar business model. You can easily find a lot of disgruntled ex members. A better idea is to contact current songwriter members on the sites (you can typically contact them through a profile page) and ask if it is working for them. Ask how long they’ve been doing it too. Try a cross section and you can eliminate the extreme responses. Most of these work for some people.

Lastly there are tip sheets that are nothing but tip sheets—they provide the facts and contact information for a quarterly or annual fee and the rest is up to you. Although the most useful tip sheets don’t screen your songs, they do screen you. In many cases, such as with New On The Charts , you have to show some credits, indicating that you are something of a pro, before you can subscribe. An online tip sheet called Songlink says: “unsigned writers or new publishers must first supply at least 2 sample demos of their work for subscription approval.” Having to have credits to get the tip sheet might sound like a Catch 22, but, like Taxi’s reasoning, these sheets must ensure that the people feeding them information, managers, producers, A&R people and the like, don’t get swamped with a lot of amateur, or just bad, efforts, or they will undermine their own networking efforts. (You can help them by only submitting appropriate material and not shooting from the hip.)

One tip sheet that is really more for performers looking for recording contracts, but often has tips in other lines is the UK based Bandit Newsletter. When they have songwriting leads, they are typically for cutting edge music. But not always. They have had listings for country songs and ballads. If you go to the web site, a popup menu will let you request a free sample copy.

This is not intended as an exhaustive list of services or tips sheets, just a starter that lets you see where leads can come from. In the next blog we will look at how music libraries really work and how you can take advantage of their invisible leads.