Yes, the Grammys happened this week. Where was the award for best guide vocal recording? Is it just me, or does anyone else think it’s weird that a ceremony celebrating recordings is criticized every year for having performances by artists who appear to be lip syncing? I always have wondered why they have live performances on the Grammy award show at all. No one goes on stage at the Oscars and performs a scene from their movie. I do not recall seeing the cast of the Big Bang Theory perform their current episode on the Emmys either. It is about the best performances captured on tape. It is more about the finished product than the actual art of the music. The whole thing is just odd to me. Don’t get me wrong, there is an art to making good recordings, but you have to have the music first. My advice is not to bother wasting three hours of your life watching these shows. You do not need some silly awards show telling you what good music is. You already know that.

Van Dyke

Much like my other passions in life, food and drink, music is very taste driven and taste can change very quickly. This is why I struggle when someone asks me what my favorite band is or my favorite album, or my favorite drink. Today, my favorite band may be Pink Floyd, my favorite album may be “Revolver” by the Beatles, and my favorite drink may be red Mountain Dew. BUT, tonight my favorite band may be Fielder, my favorite album may be “Rocks” by Aerosmith, and my favorite drink may be Jameson on the rocks. Ask me again in an hour, and I will probably have different answers. For me, music is very situational. Just like I am most likely not going to be out on the patio in my jammies at 5 a.m. grilling steaks for breakfast, I probably will not be popping in a Mastodon CD while I take my kids to school in the morning. If you know me, you would not be a bit surprised if I actually did either of those things.

It should be your own taste that drives what music you like, not some doofus blogger or tacky award show. Maybe you are picky about what you listen to, or maybe you like everything. All I ask is that you give everything a chance. As Geddy Lee from Rush once said, “There are a lot of empty calories on the radio these days.” Do not get filled up on those when you can have something good for you like a big bowl of Black Country Communion. I cannot guarantee you will like them, but you will.

Also like the best food you can eat, the best music you can hear is organically grown locally. Sure, you can shell out the money a few times a year to go see the big names in St. Louis or Chicago, and there is nothing wrong with that. All I am saying is that there is some great stuff being cooked up around here every weekend at some absolutely fantastic venues. Just check out the calendar page right here on The Local Q for details! If you do not want to go out every night, you can always stay home and make your own music. There are lots of great places to buy the freshest ingredients to do that as well, if you know what I mean.

Valentine’s Day is also this week. Do not waste your money on flowers and chocolate when you can give the gift of music. Sure you can buy some CD’s, but wouldn’t it be a better idea to buy your significant other a guitar? This works especially well if you know how to play it, so you can teach them. Use your imagination. If you do not know how to play, buy lessons for both of you. Even if neither of you continue playing and you end up donating the guitar to Six String Heroes, you will get something out of the experience. Trust me …

Don Van Dyke

A few months ago I was discussing the current state of music with a music publisher/producer in Nashville and asked the age-old question: “How does an artist make money with their music these days?” Obviously, this is a loaded question, but I really wanted to know how artists are trying to make a living in the current file sharing, $0.99 per download world. The answer I got back was pretty standard and boring: “If you figure out the answer to that one, you let me know.”

Stoner

It really is tougher than ever to make a living or even part-time dollars creating music. I don’t know any musician that picked up an instrument solely to get rich; maybe to get chicks, but not to get rich. While most artists would be fine making a meager living being able to create and perform their art, even that is a tall order these days. The worst part of this is that a ton of new music has been stifled because Jack and Jane Musician are working low-paying 50 hours a week jobs to pay the bills, buy their instruments, maybe a PA system, and a trailer or truck to haul it in, while paying for cutting some demos of their original songs. To even try to “hit the road to make a living” is just asking to be homeless when bar gigs pay no more now than they did 25 years ago. Music labels have been decimated by the music file-sharing world, so there isn’t much venture money to help new bands along and promote them.

So, about a year ago I set out on a quest to find some non-standard ways for musicians to make money with their original music without living on the street. Admittedly, I haven’t had the time to look under all the rocks and I’m still on the prowl but I’ll share with you what I have learned so far with a meager budget of $500 for the project.

First, I’m going to cover some songwriting basics and let me say some of this has been “borrowed” from my friend, John Bohlinger’s (yes, I’m name dropping) monthly column in Premier Guitar magazine (all borrowed info is in quotes). John is a Nashville multi-instrumentalist best know for his work as band leader for all six season of NBC’s hit program Nashville Star, the 2011, 2010 and 2009 CMT Music Awards, as well as many specials for GAC, PBS, CMT, and USA:

He shares: “When you write a song, you immediately own the song — 100 percent of the songwriter’s share and 100 percent of the publisher’s share. The song exists as soon as you’ve written or recorded it, and can potentially be worth money. The profits from a song are split evenly between the writer(s) and publisher.”

If you do your own publishing, you get all of the royalties or licensing from a song. If you have someone publish for you, you would split the profits 50/50. If you and your buddy co-write a song and you use a publisher, the publisher gets 50% (100% of the publishing) of the profits and the writers get 25% each (100% writing credit split two ways). In a band with 5 members, the members would have to figure out how to split up the 100% writers credit between the 5 musicians depending on how much input each member had writing the song. The drummer usually gets nothing — just kidding, drummers!!!!

Confused yet? It gets better.

What’s a publisher? John writes: “Before recordings, songwriters earned money from sheet music printed by publishers. Today, publishers don’t print much music, but they do administrate copyrights, license songs, and collect royalties for songwriters. Most importantly, publishers pitch songs to recording artists to get cuts.”

Publishers sometimes pay for recording demos of songs and often pay writers a “draw” (a monetary advance against future royalties earned). If the writer’s songs earn money, the publisher recoups the advance through the writer’s share of royalties. If the songs never make money, the publisher takes a loss. Keep in mind that as a new writer, you won’t get offered an advance since you are unproven as a writer. Most new writers without connections in New York, Nashville, or Los Angeles will need to use a publisher to get their songs “out there.”

Do you need a publisher? Bohlinger replies: “A great publisher works wonders. Bob Dylan did not become a legend because of his first few poor-selling albums. His publisher got his songs recorded by the Byrds, the Mamas & the Papas, Peter Paul & Mary, Sonny & Cher, The Hollies, and nearly every other successful act in the ’60s. After his songs hit for others, people discovered Dylan’s own recordings. Publishing worked for Dylan, but it’s not for everybody.”

Actual Dollars: There are royalty rates, mechanical royalties, licensing, and synchronization dollars. Your music can be sold for a flat fee OR you can hope it gets picked up by a big artist, put in a movie, TV show, or video game and then collect your royalties. I won’t go into detail on the standard amounts as that would double the size of this blog post your reading and put you to sleep.

Where To Sell Your Music: This is a big one. There are probably a million places and ways to go to sell your music so I’m going to tell you about two things I tried with my $500 budget. A friend of mine who is an excellent songwriter and I teamed up to try to sell his music. The first thing I did was order a publication that I had read about called Music Row Publisher’s Special that you can buy for $30 at http://www.musicrow.com/subscribe/ (Look for the back issue title Publisher’s Special). This directory gave me the names, websites, e-mails, and addresses of the big publishers in Nashville. This was tedious work but I went to each website and searched for their submission policies. They are all different so this takes time. Some refused to accept unsolicited material but many would accept emailed files or a sample CD but they all are very strict in their guidelines. I probably sent about 60 emails or CDs and did not hear back from most of them. However, it only takes one and a couple months ago, I heard back from a publisher on one particular song that he liked, and we struck a publishing deal.

As a new songwriter, no dollars were advanced, but we do now have one of the artist’s songs in a publisher’s catalog for the next two years in Nashville being shopped to big artists. If the song gets picked up and recorded and actually sells, royalties will start showing up about a year later (the industry moves SLOW). You will inevitably receive offers from many of these places offering to “pitch your song” for a fee. Some are legit and some are not. Without knowing whom to trust (or having much of a budget), I stayed away from those offers. Again, no money has come in but the seeds were planted in hopes of some future payoff.

The other avenue we tried was using TAXI. Taxi.com claims to be the leading independent A&R company (song pitchers) in the world. Here’s the lowdown, you pay $200 for a one-year subscription to TAXI. They have listings of songs needed in different genres for publishers, movie producers, TV show producers, artist’s managers, video game designers, etc. You find a listing you want to submit to you and for $5 (per listing) you submit a song and your artist profile. Your song is then evaluated by a TAXI representative to see if they feel it fits the listing and is of high enough quality to submit to their client. If it gets through the TAXI rep, they send the song to their client and the client will contact you directly if they want to make a deal. After about 25 submissions, we had two songs make it through and were presented to TAXI clients. One was for a TV show and the other for an Australian publisher. It’s been a few months, and we haven’t heard anything yet. However, I don’t know how long it usually takes to hear back from the end client. The downside is there’s no way to prove any of these listings actually exists. You are putting quite a bit of trust in everything being printed by TAXI. The band Crossfade was signed through TAXI and became a big success, so they are held up as the gold standard for this model, but buyer beware.

So, that is how we have spent the $500. Three seeds have been planted, and we now wait to see if anything grows.

THE ODDYSEY CONTINUES…

Summary

Musicians are usually very wary of business people and for good reason. The music industry has a history littered with artists being manipulated and outright robbed by business people. Do your homework and read everything you can on music business. Information is your weapon in the music industry and you need all the weapons you can get your hands on. Many artists are frightened to outright sell a piece of music, but don’t make that mistake. I know there’s a possibility that your song could go to the top of the charts, and you will be banging your head on the wall listening to it the rest of your life. But believe me, those chances are very slim and if you’re that good, you’ll be able to write another hit. Many would argue that this is a stupid way to do business. Maybe, but if you want to make music, selling your tunes outright may be what allows you to do just that.

John offers this example: “Willie Nelson shares this philosophy. He received less than $300 in total for three of the biggest revenue-generating songs of all time — ‘Crazy,’ ‘Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away,’ and ‘Night Life.’ Though he lost millions on these songs, their success made people recognize his genius as an artist (and gullibility as a businessman), which led to the incredible career he’s enjoyed for over half a century. Had Willie not sold his songs for a pittance to some smarter businessmen, he may not have become Willie Nelson. Business people will exploit the talents of artists, but usually some reward makes it to the artists, enabling them to create. Sometimes the best business plan in the arts is to focus on making great art.”

Steve Stoner

Keith Franx (acoustic)
WHEN: 6 p.m. Thursday
WHERE: Martinis at 515, 515 Maine

PubL1c D1sturbance and Devonte “Jonvine” Clark (rock)
WHEN: 8 a.m. Friday
WHERE: Turner Hall, 926 Hampshire
COST: $3

George Cate featuring Steve Stoner (acoustic)
WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday
WHERE: Martinis at 515, 515 Maine

Highway 99 (country)
WHEN: 8:30 p.m. Friday
WHERE: Johnny Bang Bang’s, 138 N. Front

Ketcham Louden Live (acoustic)
WHEN: 9:30 p.m. Friday
WHERE: One Restaurant & Bar, 600 Hampshire

AD/HD (Tribute to AC/DC)
WHEN: 8:30 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: Johnny Bang Bang’s, 138 N. Front

The Cheeseburgers (classic rock)
WHEN: 8:30 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: The Wood Inn, Carthage, Ill.

Kevin Brashears & The Mighty Mississippi Band (country/classic rock)
WHEN: 9 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: The Holler and Swaller Saloon, 538 Washington

Tri Point Paradox (rock)
WHEN: 9:30 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: One Restaurant & Bar, 600 Hampshire

Barrington Wildfire (acoustic)
WHEN: 2 p.m. Sunday
WHERE: Ridgeview Winery, Mount Sterling

More details on upcoming shows are available on the calendar page at www.thelocalq.com.

For information on bands and concert venues, go to the music page at www.thelocalq.com.

Submit details for upcoming shows at www.thelocalq.com/node/1767.