Getting My Ducks Lined Up

Last year, I subscribed to a songwriting service called "Taxi." Basically, it's a company made up of former record label and publishing executives that brokers songs written by it's members. Taxi's customers are artists, record labels, music publishers and music supervisors for TV shows and movies. In a nutshell, anybody who's not a songwriter, but needs a song.

I had been a member many years ago, but never really seemed to get any positive feedback. It seemed that no matter what the particular criteria they were looking to be met was, I was failing miserably at it. In the end, I began to think that maybe it was all just a big come-on, designed to get the $200 yearly membership fee out of me.

Although I had pretty much written Taxi off as a viable way of weaseling myself into the music industry, I would still occasionally get mailings from them, with stories of their members' success. This guy licensed three songs to a TV show, that girl got her song covered by a well-known country artist. Each story was more tantalizing than the last. Once more, I started to let myself dream of an established artist including one of my songs on their million-selling album, the way that a lottery ticket holder spends their pre-drawing time imagining what they'll do with their jackpot, should they win. The standard royalty that goes to the songwriter is roughly $.09, making placement on a million-selling album a $90,000 payday. For me, a life-changing amount of money.

Last year, I figured I'd take another shot at it. I also decided that I'd make a concerted effort to view Taxi's want ads as assignments, as if I was a Brill Building songwriter in the early 1960's. My first few submissions were not forwarded on to clients, but I was getting some great feedback from the Taxi screeners about how well my songs were structured and recorded. Eventually, my song "Call On Me" was forwarded to a publisher. Although they eventually turned it down, I felt as though I'd jumped a major hurdle. Maybe this was going to work after all.

During the course of the year, I had six songs forwarded to record labels and publishers. Though none produced any contracts or five-figure royalty checks, I was encouraged by my nominal success rate of 17% (percentage of songs being forwarded to clients). Being that my previous year with Taxi had yielded a 0% success rate, I was feeling pretty good about what a possible round three might eventually produce. This third try, however, would require me to do a little more groundwork, if I was going to gain further traction.

Several months ago, I began recording a small batch of songs which I thought would be good to have at the ready; two country/pop songs (lots of country artists rely on outside writers), two Christmas songs (not many good new ones out there) and two songs that sound like they're from the 1980's (music supervisors are ALWAYS looking for these). I've made some pretty good headway on the recordings, and I've even decided to bring in outside singers to help me with the quality and overall feel of the vocals. I know a lot of talented singers and if they can make my song sound better, I'm going to use them to help me sell it. I should be done in a couple of weeks, and then I'll join Taxi again and see if my strategy works. I'm optimistic.