Author: IJ

Songs Of Love Foundation

Posted on by IJ
I received this email from Anis A., the Director of Music and Special Projects for the Songs of Love Foundation:
“The Songs of Love Foundation is a national nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that creates free, personalized, original songs to uplift children and teens currently facing tough medical, physical or emotional challenges. Each CD is professionally produced with lyrics containing the child’s name and references to all of his or her favorite activities, things, people, and pets. Songs are written and performed in any language in the musical style that the child likes best (pop, R&B, rap, rock, alternative, etc.), by a variety of talented professionals.
“Songwriters who have written for us have going to signing record deals and even winning a Grammy. Jason Mraz is just one of them. Not to mention Michael Bolton, David Lee Roth, Itaal Shur and many more.
“We are looking for songwriters that can help us, by giving back with the talents that they were given, to some really deserving kids and teens. If a songwriter feels they can create a one-of-a-kind song for a child/teen then we would greatly appreciate their talents.”
If you would like to contribute to the good works of this organization, here is some contact info:
Email:

Welcome!

Posted on by IJ

This website is meant for songwriters of all sorts. I’ve been writing songwriting articles since 1996 and pretty much all of them are still available! To see a list of all of the articles, you can go right here. Otherwise I welcome you to peruse the site whichever way you want.

Happy writing 🙂

IJ

22 Writers for 1 Song?!?

Posted on by IJ

The official song of the 2015 Pan Am Games, “Together We Are One” sung by Serena Ryder, apparently has 22 writers to its credit.

I can hear the jokes now: “Which word did you write?”

Seriously, this is the music biz at its worst.  Everybody wants a piece of the action so everyone has to have their name on the credits, even if you were just sitting in the room. It’s greedy and ridiculous. And the songwriter who did the most work or who came up with the idea (we’ll likely never know who that was), is pretty much ripped off because he/she has to share whatever income the song generates, along with getting lost in credits crowded by 21 other people.

The song itself is your standard pop arena anthem with nothing special to it.  Other than the fact there are 22 writer credits.

Honestly.

IJ

Songland Could Be Good If…

Posted on by IJ
Adam Levine

If you haven’t yet heard about it, Adam Levine, Dave Stewart and the executive producer of The Voice, Audrey Morrissey, will be teaming up to produce a new series called Songland.

The whole idea behind Songland is that songwriters will get a chance to pitch their songs to a panel, very much like vocalists vying for a deal on The Voice, and the winner will, I’m guessing, get their song recorded by a big name artist. Continue reading “Songland Could Be Good If…”

It Ain’t Right

Posted on by IJ

One of my favourite songs a couple of years back was the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams. I was grieving the death of my father who died at the age of 91 of Alzheimers just before than and that song just perked me up out of my gloom.  I even wrote a post about it on my I Like Songs blog.  Well, I didn’t write much, I just wanted to feature it.

It’s no surprise that the song was an enormous hit.

What IS a surprise is an article I read just recently about the income it generated from Pandora.  There were 43 million streams.  And what did it earn?  A measly $2700.  Yes, to some of you $2700 sounds like a lot of money.  But 43 million streams?

This is why I removed my music from all of the music streaming services more than a year ago. Granted, I wouldn’t have expected to have 43 million streams, but I did expect to be fairly compensated for the streams I DID have, and that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

Then I did a little research just for my own satisfaction.  It costs $4.99 a year to join Pandora at the time of this writing.  Let’s just round that up to $5.  A website I stumbled across listed 37 “interesting” Pandora statistics, and they listed about 76.5 million active Pandora listeners.  That comes to about $382.5 million bucks.  But wait.  There are actually 250 million subscribers, so Pandora is making $1.25 BILLION a year.

So who is getting all that money?

There have been countless other articles lately bemoaning music streaming services, so I’m not going to tell you anything new here.  Those of us who grew up on radio got used to the idea of it being “free”.  Well, it wasn’t really free, it was just paid for by somebody else.  Advertisers paid radio stations to run their ads, and radio stations paid PRO’s (performer rights organizations) to play their artists’ songs.  Why shouldn’t music streaming services pay the same per play?  I don’t understand why fair pay was not implemented at the very beginning.

The fact is that it is really difficult to explain to non-musicians that artists and bands need to be fairly compensated for their work.  All music lovers want is free music.

But it is not hard to explain to a music streaming service that they should be giving a much larger slice of the pie to the people who created their content.  And no, that doesn’t mean charging listeners more.  It simply means not giving so much to the fat, belching CEO’s who could care less about the music.

Okay, rant over.

IJ