Getting your songs out there

I'm sure this has been covered many times over, but after flipping through the archives, I haven't seen something that thoroughly addresses the issue..... how do I get my songs out there?

I think the more specific version of this is "how do you network with musicians who might be interested in playing your work/collaborating with you?"

With two jobs (and having done the band thing), all of my free time is spent composing and working with my instruments... so getting out and networking with local musicians is just not all that practically feasible. I'm sure there are a lot of bands out there that would be interested in flipping through a number of songwriters' catalogs... after all, it's an "original" for them without having to do the work of composing. Even as a composer being in a band, if I had heard some really good stuff that I thought we could really succeed with, it'd be a no-brainer to work with that person.. It's a perfect match. The problem is... how do you get the musicians and the writers together? Random chance via friends and bars just doesn't seem to be intuitively the quickest way...

Here are some possible resources that I've seen. I'd love to get this community's feedback on their real utility (not just the hype, y'know):

youtube: while it worked for Journey to find a new singer, this doesn't seem to be a workable venue even for the most talented. Even someone like Gustavo Guerra still has no more than online success (and a NI sponsorship), so far as I know. This seems like a medium that's best suited for learning new material (instructional material abounds), quickly finding songs and getting some new ideas.

myspace: this is something that I've yet to fully try. Has anyone had success with this? It seems like a decently sized community of musicians.. is it good for networking and idea-sharing? Or is it too young and lacking in real dedicated people? Along the same vein... are any of the other social networking sites any better?

taxi: a scam from what I can tell... unless you happen to produce polished, boilerplate, nicely produced made-for-tv music. I compose and play guitar, synth, and drums, but singing is not my forte... an inauspicious combination for this site, I think.

...other songwriting forums?

As composers, I think we're in the same boat as novelists... it's so easy for someone to claim that title that you have throngs of people doing it with little way of differentiating the good from the not-so-good without hearing all the work.. which isn't practical. The novelists, at least, don't have to worry with instruments, gear, vocals, production, etc.... specialization makes sense (one person composes, another performs).. but I'm nearly clueless as to how this can be done without actively being a part of a band or having some really quality music industry connections.

Any thoughts? I'm always game for some good perspective

You should be able to find out where the local musicians hang out and make connections. Perhaps one of those bands is looking for a songwriter? Since the Beatles, most musicians in bands write their own material. The major exceptions are Nashville and Top 40 Pop. If local doesn't work, try this ...

Quit your day jobs. Move to a major song town like Nashville, LA, or NY. While there, make songwriting your full time job and get a second job doing something else to make rent. Make connections. If you are lucky, something happens and your songs get out there -- which could mean just about anything, don't ya think?

Though that path may give you million to one odds, it is better than the ten billion to one odds via the internet. You may get folks to notice if you make a splash in your hometown (by selling out shows, selling a bunch of CDs, or getting your songs on a band's CD that sells like crazy), but it sounds like you have stopped doing that.

If that doesn't sound like a feasible plan, you may need to redefine your notion of getting your songs out there.

No matter what path you take, keep writing.

When I said "get my songs out there", what I mean is that I would like for the good ones to have a chance at a life of their own outside of my studio.

Unfortuantely, you're right about most bands writing their own material since the Beatles. This is something that I have never quite understood. In the history of Western music, this is a bit unusual. Most of the time, there is specialization. If someone studies piano or an orchestral instrument, it's basically understood that they'll be playing someone else's material. Considering how demanding it is to play instruments beyond a certain level, it's surprising to me that there is such a sharp division. Unless you write, play and perform and sacrifice everything to do so.... there's not much out there. Part of this, I think, can be blamed on how little proficiency a lot of rock musicians have with their instruments. But there are virtuosos out there... do we demand that they also be songwriters? Why? The result is people like Yngwie and others in that same vein. The playing is beautiful, but the writing is sometimes quite painful.

Quitting the day jobs is not a possibility. I'm mid-career and professional in both of them with a family in tow... besides, I don't want music to become my livelihood... it's way too much pressure create marketable art. I'll be writing music for the rest of my life, I'm sure, since it's something I've always loved... but it would be nice if it were possible to share it with others without having to give up my entire life to do so.

Perhaps it would be instructive to find songwriters who have done that? Off the top of my head, I can't think of too many that kept their day jobs yet became successful songwriters while still alive (help me out on this one). I'd bet that they'd be the Nashville songwriters -- but I'd guess that after a couple of hits, they would quit their day jobs.

It is a rare exception for part-time artists to hit it big during their three score and ten. Even the fulltimers who were huge during their lifetimes are sometimes forgotten and get no posthumous laurels. Look back throughout the ages and you'll find that the ones we remember now were the talk of the town then. It's possible to get your stuff out there, just not too probable.

Again, I think it really depends on what you think "getting your stuff out there" means. I think the common definition is making it big and making a living at it -- going pro. I don't subscribe to that one, but I believe many do.

btw, I notice that you're new. HOWDY!!!

Hey, Zen, sounds like you're more or less where I was a while back... sitting on a big stack of songs but with little or no desire to do the music biz runaround anymore.

A decade or so ago, when internet music distribution was just taking off (the heady days of Mp3.com, etc), I was doing produced versions of my songs in the style that most interested me at the time, a sort of roots oriented downtempo (which I guess we now call indietronic or folktronica or something awful like that ). My songs were getting DL'd in decent enough quantities. (There were a number of glitches in their accounting system but I estimate I had approximately 65K-70K DLs/listens there. I was credited with ~48K, I think, on my main account when the counting system went south but DLs continued.)

But I could tell from the reactions of many 'traditional' music fans that my music was really not up their alley.

And since much of my writing is as traditional as my production was postmodern, I figured I needed to get some straightforward, rootsy versions out that a country or folk artist could listen to and say, hey, good song, without getting distracted by hip hop beats, backwards guitars, and layers of synths.

So I started a blog dedicated to acoustic versions of my songs. The initial concept was a song a day for a year. After about 7 months of actually getting a newly recorded song a day up, I hit the wall... I went all the way through the collection, though, and started back around. I'd thought there were about 200 songs, but when push came to shove there were only 135 I was willing to put up in front of God and everybody... Happily, the writing slump I was going through at the time seemed to ease after I got through the whole thing and I started writing some new songs again... so I'm up to around 150 or maybe a few more.

One thing I did was create a page specially oriented to those who might want to cover my songs, with a player on the page stocked with all the versions (my songs often tend to change with every recording), alphabetically, subsorted in more or less inverted quality order (top best). I also made sure I had a couple ways to search my site. I created a database utility to search for specific strings in titles and used Google's site seach function to zero in a Google search on my site. (I had a URL change in there that screwed up my Google searches for a while but it's slowly sorted itself out, for the most part.)

I've had a few folks contact me about doing my songs, but I'm not sure they ever went ahead. Off the top of my head, I'm not recalling any cover recordings that came out of the blog. (I did say that I welcomed cover performances and that licensing for commercial release would be painless.)

I have had a number of contacts from fans, and a number of nice comments. But that would be counted in two figures, scores, not hundreds. (And low two figures, at that.)

So it was with growing astonishment that when I set up a statistics report at Archive.org (where my freely available acoustic versions are stored) that I saw that I had over 50 songs that had been DL'd a thousand or more times each. With 400 podcasts (since Fall 2005), it added up: a little over 270,000 DLs. (Probably about 269K confused, disappointed listeners, but, hey, the numbers I have are the numbers I have. )

So... has it put me on the map?

No.

But, slowly but surely, a cyberinch at a time, I'm laying the groundwork...

By the time I'm 75, I'm gonna be a star...

By the time I'm 75, I'm gonna be a star...

Which kind?

Just read temperature as downloads. Not sure if I'll ever make it as any kind of star, but I'm certain I could be some kind of gaseous object.

Indubitably.

Stack: Hi! hehe... it's nice to talk to a few similar heads here... while the industry may be flooded with material, I don't meet too many folks that are into the same thing, regardless of genre.

I think you're probably right about most people's conception of getting heard: stardom. My aspirations are a bit different. I'm happy where I am. I'd just like to share my stuff eventually on a small scale without having to hassle with trying to make a career of it. Blue summed it up nicely:

Blue, the fact that you started a blog tells me that there aren't really any websites or resources out there for this kind of thing... that's surprising, really. I was thinking about a music equivalent to deviantart.com (or at least what it used to be). The only problem I can see with a blog like that is making people aware that it exists. That's why a community like deviantart worked. Although honestly, the kind of success that you achieved with that blog is basically the kind of thing that I'm looking for. Perhaps that's a good route to try.

A song a day for seven months is pretty prodigious output! I've heard of painters that suggest doing one painting per day for a month or two... but that's for practice and done so that one doesn't labor like Dolce on a small detail for months (and also since it's better to practice with quantity instead of trying to polish freshman efforts). When I read the taxi brochure, they spoke of doing upwards of 100 pieces per year... that's still a bit much by my account... but then again, my project studio is still relatively new (only maybe 40-50 real pieces recorded over a period of a couple of years since I've been learning the art of recording and practicing my instruments and acquiring gear at the same time), perhaps it will be easier once everything is streamlined.

The way I see it, even if I just end up with a small group of people that have my stuff tucked away on their hard drive somewhere, pulling it out on occasion to listen to and say, "hey, that's really all right"... that's enough for me. If it's good enough, it will spread through the community and beyond... but if it doesn't, just as well. I just want my work to at least have a shot at exposure... something that it doesn't have now since I'm not performing at the moment.

Now that you all have teased out what I really meant by the OP, I see that my goals may really be a bit different than your average guy with rock star aspirations. haha...

Is there a gaseous white dwarf?

Because at the rate I'm going...

I'm hoping to become famous after I die. Then again, maybe it's better if my music gets buried with me. Well if they can, the kids will make money off my music after I croak. At least that

Blue, the fact that you started a blog tells me that there aren't really any websites or resources out there for this kind of thing... that's surprising, really. I was thinking about a music equivalent to deviantart.com (or at least what it used to be). The only problem I can see with a blog like that is making people aware that it exists. That's why a community like deviantart worked. Although honestly, the kind of success that you achieved with that blog is basically the kind of thing that I'm looking for. Perhaps that's a good route to try. A song a day for seven months is pretty prodigious output! I've heard of painters that suggest doing one painting per day for a month or two... but that's for practice and done so that one doesn't labor like Dolce on a small detail for months (and also since it's better to practice with quantity instead of trying to polish freshman efforts). When I read the taxi brochure, they spoke of doing upwards of 100 pieces per year... that's still a bit much by my account... but then again, my project studio is still relatively new (only maybe 40-50 real pieces recorded over a period of a couple of years since I've been learning the art of recording and practicing my instruments and acquiring gear at the same time), perhaps it will be easier once everything is streamlined. The way I see it, even if I just end up with a small group of people that have my stuff tucked away on their hard drive somewhere, pulling it out on occasion to listen to and say, "hey, that's really all right"... that's enough for me. If it's good enough, it will spread through the community and beyond... but if it doesn't, just as well. I just want my work to at least have a shot at exposure... something that it doesn't have now since I'm not performing at the moment. Now that you all have teased out what I really meant by the OP, I see that my goals may really be a bit different than your average guy with rock star aspirations. haha...

Mind you, that was just a funky acoustic recording of a song a day... not actually writing a song a day. At my peak, when I was gigging as a folkie a lot, I was probalby writing 2-3 songs a month -- but of varying quality. But I'd fallen down to about that many a year when I got involved with my blog and started hanging around here with my fellow sufferers... I mean songwriters.

Well, I'm also on download sites like SoundClick (I started up there around 2002, when it looked like Mp3.com was headed for the drain), on MySpace (starting in 2004) and now on Last.fm, iLike/Facebook, and just getting a few up at ReverbNation. But there are a jillion others. (Check the Resource link at the top of the forum listings.)

There are early adopters... and compulsive adopters.

This should give you an idea of which category I'm in; here's the social net section from my personal page:

socialnet MySpace :: one blue nine MySpace :: TK Major Facebook Twitter FriendFeed Email TK

... and...

... here's the DL/streaming section:

music/downloads from TK Major and one blue nine: Last.fm :: one blue nine :: genre-bending mutant roots pop Last.fm :: TK :: acoustic/roots music Soundclick :: obn :: largest selection, free 128 kbps downloads SoundClick :: TK :: free downloads ReverbNation :: obn :: we'll be adding more soon iLike :: obn blog/podcast: A Year of Songs videos: YouTube

(I had to break it up because there's a limit of 10 images per post on this bb.)

I have stuff up in other places but I figure I have to concentrate on a manageable handful.

I've been on Soundclick for a long time and there are a lot of good things about it -- biggest prob, though, is that they reduce the quality of mp3s on the free accounts to 128 kbps... and that's just not competitive, these days.

So I've been moving out to some newer, less musician-oriented sites like Last and the music side of Facebook, iLike.

MySpace IS a big deal and you ignore it at your own risk -- but the sound quality is low for regular plebian accounts (big artists seem to be able to con them into carrying higher quality recordings but the rest of us seem to be restricted to about 96 kbps).

I'm not at all fond of MySpace -- but they have made HUGE infrastructure/coding improvements in recent months that make it considerably more usable. Still, the quality is low and the number of songs is still limited to 6 per band.

But it is still very popular among young people and music fans, with Facebook more geared to the white wine and cheese set (or WW&C set-in-training); FB's fastest growing segment is older women, I recently read. (I'm already gearing up to meet a nice widow lady with a comfortable nest egg. )

Other than open mike nights, I have not had any success with that myself. I think when it comes down to it, legwork is the biggest thing. I don't like the word "networking," because it sounds impersonal and cynical. There's nothing wrong with spending a couple hours per week listening to the live musicians in your town, supporting the scene, and getting to know them. If things go well, you may end up with some friends who will want to hear your songs and maybe record their own versions of them. If not, at least you've had a good time and helped other musicians.

That brings up another point: What are you doing to help others get their music out there - like to you? (OP, I don't really mean you personally, I mean all of us, perhaps especially me.) If nobody is listening, nobody can get heard.

This forum, by the way, is a great place for it. It's hard work listening to songs from people you don't know, especially when you have no indication of the quality, but we only get out of things what we put in sometimes. I'll admit, I've been a bit of a slacker lately, but I try.

..... Jeez, I'm depressed now. John:facepalm:

Man! Me too! I think I'm just going to follow the advice in your sig though and see what happens.

Yeah... I mean, what is one doing it all for, anyhow?

If it's about money... or fame... well... good luck. Take us all out to dinner when you're big as Brit.

If it's about posterity, make sure you put down roots, consider putting stuff up on Archive.org (the "Internet Archive"), which will make that stuff 'perpetually' freely available. (Like anything much is perpetual in this life, eh?) Make sure people know about you. Get your music out there.

But if it's about actually making music and writing... well, job one is doing same.

Get busy. Keep writing.

You can market yourself when you're temporarily out of musical ideas or just need a break...

PS to Zen Monkey, re blogs: The best way to get news of a blog or podcast out there is the RSS feed that should be part of any blog. Of course, anyone with a little HTML/web design experience can put up a blog -- but most people, including me -- and I'm a web developer -- find it easier to use an 'automated' free blog service like Blogger (or Blogspot or any of the similar, Google-owned blog services) or other online services. If you already have a website and hosting account, it may have a free automated blogging software available as part of the package.

The nice thing about an automated blog is that you don't have to fuss around with setting up and updating your own RSS feeds, which can save a minute or three -- and that's crucial if you're updating your blog regularly... and updating content regularly is the key to keeping readers coming back.

I found with my blog that the written content seemed to be something of a draw. I put a fair bit of effort into it, I'll admit. When I was young, I thought of myself as a fiction writer but hadn't written much fiction in a while. (I'm actually planning on creating a print edition of the blog's vignettes and essays as an on-demand book using Amazon's CreateSpace service. A friend who's a long time poetry book/mag publisher has moved his magazine onto the web and his books to CreateSpace printed -- he buys them in bulk to sell directly but also make them available online, as well.

I don't think there's a lot of money to be made but I'm gonna get a book out before I die, so help me.

For God, for glory, or for gold.

Or forget it.

BTW, even if one is not much of a prose writer, a blog can be a very good tool for a musician or band. Make sure that you take full advantage of the RSS tools your blog offers you, wherever it is. You can use that to feed other sites, counting on the blogging softare to take care of feed updates for you.

Post pics, post gig dates, write about new songs that you're posting to the web -- and make sure it's tied into your twitter and other sites using tools like TwitterFeed and the widgets that are becoming widely available for everything from embedding off-site streaming music and video players to news feeds from your other sites and pages.

If this isn't a Lewis Carroll quote I'm buying a cabin in Northern Minnesota and never coming back.

I work with a person whose main professional responsibility is to Tweet about our company and try to recruit people (internally referred to as "widgeteers") to develop applications around our product.

I hear real estate in Northern Minnesota is pretty cheap right now...

You spread your songs around by joining forums and shamelessly plugging yourself. Let me give you an example.

HEY GUISE LISTEN 2 MY TUNES KAY?

www.myspace.com/Junonband

Wash Rinse Repeat

If you have no shame, then put them in your sig like me

LOL

PLEASE let me make it perfectly clear:

I strongly suspect that Twitter is the final stop on the perpetual information chain... it's where ones and zeros go to die. Alone, Unscanned. At peace.

But... the automated interconnectedness angle -- that's the interesting thing.

So, whenever you do anything, you feed it in one place and then you have robots to generate sort the information and disseminate it automatically to all the venues that are required in order to be a connected musician these days...

And then, on the other end, you have Twitter to collect this deathless flow of entirely mortal information in easy-to-ignore 140 character strings.

Speaking of sig line advertising... I'm actually going to streamline my indulgences. For one thing, I'm slowly going to be shifting over my emphasis from my old stalwart free upload joints to some of the newer ones that allow higher fi uploads and even have some marketing promo features that are kind of interesting (though all feed into upsale possibibilities, as the world-wise will expect). So, don't be surprised if you look down from one of my posts one of these days soon and there's just a link. Or two. Or maybe...

[quote name=blue2blue;33685390...I've been on Soundclick for a long time and there are a lot of good things about it ... MySpace IS a big deal and you ignore it at your own risk -- but the sound quality is low for regular plebian accounts ...But it is still very popular among young people and music fans' date=' with Facebook more geared to the white wine and cheese set (or WW&C set-in-training); FB's fastest growing segment is older women, I recently read.[/quote]

This is a lot of the kind of information I was looking for. Thanks, man. I'll definitely have to check these places out and post up some stuff when I finally stop fidgeting with my mixes long enough to create the blog

I did some web development myself, but that was a long time ago... and private contracting with that stuff is a royal pain, even if it pays well. The blog thing is very tempting though. I feel like that's a good direction for me now. Makes a lot of sense and has all the elements I'm looking for.

To answer Eddie's comment on helping other musicians/writers... I love doing that. I'll give most anyone a listen. I'm a big proponent of the idea that a lot of the good stuff in music is like quality literature... most people don't understand it, so it doesn't become famous very easily. How James Joyce managed to become famous I don't know. He's an unbelievably good writer... but I wouldn't have thought Finnegan's Wake was popularly accessible, y'know? I used to spend more time in coffee shops and bars listening to local musicians than I do now. When I was out of college, I was plugged into the music scene in my hometown... but aside from providing encouragement, there wasn't much I could do, really. It was a bit depressing, actually, since I knew some talented singer/songwriters that performed all the time, but couldn't manage to break into the business in any meaningful way.

James Joyce's fame was acquired well before Finnegans Wake (1941), which is not, as you point out, popularly accessible. He was well known in Parisian and European literary circles by the time of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Probably the biggest boost to his fame was the United States Customs Service decision to ban Ulysses (1922) and the subsequent (successful) legal case to overturn the ban (1933).

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/09/specials/joyce-court.html

I guess I wonder what you mean by that. It sounds like you may be implying the common stardom model to me, but I can't be sure. "Talented singer/songwriters that performed all the time" sounds like they were busy getting gigs and playing their songs. How is that meaningless?

I often think that there's an attitude in music (from individuals in the biz and those outside of it) that you must be huge like Springsteen or U2 in order to be meaningful in the business. Artists of that size are basically corporate monoliths like Microsoft or McDonald's ... they may have started small, but eventually went global.

Yet when I want a burger, I rarely go to McDonald's. Instead I hit a local burger joint. Many local musicians and singer/songwriters are just like your favorite local mom-n-pop places. Small businesses, yes. But the business they do isn't small or meaningless at all.