Category Archives: songwriting

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We Love Music – But Who Pays For It?

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There are so many bad things happening in the world these days that a lot of news stories end up even lower on the radar than usual.

It certainly didn’t receive anywhere near the attention that Will Smith’s incident with Chris Rock did, but did you know that last year, Canadian songwriters made an average of only $67.14? Talk about a slap in the face.

Ever since music ventured into the digital realm, more and more people have been using streaming services to create their playlists. And many find ways to create digital copies of songs so they don’t have to purchase them.

But, of course, it didn’t start with the internet.

When cassette tapes were the big thing, we would record songs off the radio or make copies of our albums to play in our cars. And with the advent of recordable CD’s and the internet, we found a way to download and record songs that we wanted copies of.

With everybody streaming music these days, I decided to research how much a songwriter actually makes from streaming their songs. It turns out that they get, on average, about $0.005 per stream. That means their song would have to be streamed 200 times just to make one dollar.

One dollar. For 200 streams.

Spotify is reported to have about 406 million subscribers. About half of those pay $10 a month for the service while the “free” service includes ads.

That means Spotify rakes in about $2 billion a month just from subscribers. Never mind the ad revenue. Where does all that money go?

If you’re a Rihanna or a Justin Bieber, you’re not too worried about money. But if you’re a songwriter trying to make some kind of living from your work, well, don’t give up your day job.

Don’t get me wrong: it has always been a challenge making a living as a performing songwriter. Never mind how COVID has impacted live performances in the last couple of years.

But when I was doing that back in the 90’s, at least I could sell a CD or two.

I can’t tell you how many times I was told that not getting paid for a gig was okay because it would be great “exposure”.

Sometimes I was lucky and they would pass a hat during my performance.

On one occasion, I was asked to play right after a poetry reading night at a coffeehouse in Burnaby. They were going to pass the hat that night, and they did so during the poetry readings.

When the poetry was done, the poets and the patrons left and took the “hat” with them. I was left with empty pockets and one person to play to for an hour. She sat on the couch politely listening, probably too embarrassed to walk out and leave me all alone.

If you got your song on the radio back then, which I did a few times, you were at least fairly compensated. And if you were really lucky and the song caught on, you were on your way.

When the internet became a thing, I remember thinking that this would be a great way to reach so many more people without having to go on the road.

I was partially right.

In fact, in the very beginning, I got a couple of my songs on one of the first digital music platforms, mp3.com. A lot of businesses played mp3.com stations, and if your song got into rotation on one of those, you were doing well. I made some real money from that.

According to Wikipedia, “At its peak, MP3.com delivered over 4 million MP3 formatted audio files per day to over 800,000 unique users on a customer base of 25 million registered users.”

It was a great venue for independent artists to not only get that “exposure”, but make a little money at it too. And then everything changed, mp3.com was sold, and it morphed into something else. 

Big digital companies caught on to mp3.com’s success, and now here we are with streaming services that, once again, have no respect for content creators.

SOCAN, the Society for Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, is trying to do something about this by pushing for Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act.

But I really think more needs to be done to force digital streaming services to pay actual money for the content they use to make their fortunes.

Now THAT would be music to my ears.

If I Had It All To Do Again

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I was 12 when I wrote my first song, and songwriting has been a big part of my life ever since then. It helped me to cope with a lot of life’s events, and gave me a way to express my desires, my opinions, and my sense of humour in some cases. As it turns out, many songwriters start writing at about that time in their lives, and for the same reason. The angst-filled adolescent and teenage years are truly a creative (or destructive, in some cases) hotbed for all kinds of things.

I’ve written dozens and dozens of articles on all aspects of songwriting since I first put up a website in 1995. I’ve met a lot of other songwriters over the years because of that website, and participated in other online sites, some of which are still very active. They include the Muses Muse, a huge songwriting community created by a fellow Canadian Jodi Krangle, and SongU, a kind of songwriting university designed by Danny Arena and his wife Sara Light from Nashville, both of who are very involved in teaching and who have also written songs for a Broadway musical. It was really exciting to watch when they were nominated for a Tony!

I’ve performed hundreds of times for the smallest of events to big ones, for all kinds of people. My smallest audience was an audience of one :-). It was at a coffee shop in Burnaby a few years back in the middle of winter. The evening started out as a poetry reading, and I was supposed to be the second act. Well, once the poetry reading was over, the audience all left too! All except for one. She sat on a couch and patiently listened through a whole set of my songs. We laughed in between at this odd, private concert she was getting. Outside it was dark and raining pretty hard…no wonder there were no stragglers off the street, it was a terrible night!

It would be hard to say what my largest audience was…but I’ve performed for audiences at festivals where there were literally hundreds and probably thousands of people within earshot.

There was a time when I didn’t even perform my own material, I basically just played cover songs at bars in order to make some money. I’d slip the odd original song in, but I had little confidence in my own songs then. I didn’t like that kind of performing much…driving alone up to Duncan, about an hour’s drive from my home, over a pretty tricky part of the highway called the Malahat, playing three hours, and then driving back again after midnight, was not my idea of a good time. I just about gave up performing for good after that!

In the early 90’s I discovered recording and that was the beginning of a whole new aspect of music for me. I began by recording my own songs, of course, but I also got to record others, and had an opportunity to record some music for a television series called “Home Check with Shell Busey”. When I listen now to those first recording attempts, I cringe :-). I didn’t take any training, all of my learning came hands on. And I made a lot of mistakes! Eventually, I got better…the highlight came when I was asked to write the theme music along with many other music beds for CHEK News here in Victoria.

Another aspect of music that blossomed for me was teaching guitar. I made a proposal to a local community organization to teach adults guitar in an eight week program and I did that for a couple of years beginning in 1989. Then I was approached by a woman, Becky Bernson, who was also a guitar teacher, to become a part of an organization called the Whistling Gypsy. It was meant to be a kind of teaching umbrella, but part of the mandate was to put on folk music concerts featuring better known artists and groups travelling through our area. Becky and I would each teach guitar classes and private students out of our homes, and she gathered up other teachers in voice, bass, mandolin, and banjo among others.

At its peak, the Whistling Gypsy did very well, but it was a non-profit organization and it was hard to keep enough volunteers involved to manage the events and keep it going. Still as the Whistling Gypsy came to an end, I continued teaching. These days I average anywhere from 30 to 50 students, some private, some in classes, and teaching continues to be one of my main functions. I can’t tell you how much fun it is for me to watch someone learn to play their first chord on a guitar :-). I do have times when I get a little burned out, but find me a class of adults who have never been near a guitar before and I’m happy as a pig in mud! When I get them playing their first song, the smiles on their faces are priceless.

My Dad didn’t know what to think when I talked about playing guitar and performing when I was a kid. He didn’t see that as anything more than a hobby. And it took many years for me to find the confidence to pursue the many avenues of music that I did. But if I had it all to do again, I wouldn’t change any of it. The song in the video above, however, tells a different story.

There is a poem out there called When I Am An Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple, by Jenny Joseph. If you’ve never come across it, you might find it a treat to read. What it meant to me when I first read it, was the idea of believing that old age would bring with it a kind of liberation from having to do what we have to do now. At the end of the poem, the writer considers that perhaps she should start doing those crazy things in the present so that people won’t get too shocked when she begins to wear purple in her old age.

The underlying message I think is the idea that we really want to live our lives fully and completely NOW. When I was writing this song, I was imaging getting to the end of one’s life and having regrets. I sure hope I don’t. Quick! Get me the purple clothes and the red hat!

IJ

Inhale, Exhale

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News Bulletin:  I have been working on a song.  You might think “big deal, you write songs”, but this is the first time in a long time that I have really focused on my own songwriting.  I found a little piece of a guitar progression that I had recorded maybe a year or two ago on my handy dandy mp3 recorder, and it struck me as interesting so I decided to go further with it.  That sounds easy enough, but it hasn’t been.

I realize that I am very distracted by many things during the day whether it’s reading emails, checking on stocks, prepping for my students, teaching, making calls;  and the list goes on.  The majority of my songwriting “life”, I didn’t have the same distractions.  I used to just sit in my bedroom on my bed and write.  So I decided that in order to really give it the attention it needs, I was going to turn everything off for an hour a day including the tv, phones, computers, etc. and just sit with my guitar in front of a piece of paper.  I’ve done this a few times now and have had mediocre results.

In the last week or so I’ve had a great deal of trouble sleeping, so one night after an hour of lying there, my mind darting through a whole alphabet of ideas and events, worries and frustrations, I decided to focus on the lyrics of that song.  And I realized that lying in the quiet and dark at 2am is a very good time to focus on lyrics;  there is nothing to distract you and your mind can find all kinds of interesting words and phrases and ideas.  So I finally got up and wrote a few of them down.  I had to fumble in my purse in the dark to find my hookbook and a pen and then I ran to the bathroom where there’s a night light and I could see what I was writing.  I bought the hookbook years ago, but it has mostly been used for writing down to do lists, phone numbers and other eroneous bits of information.  This is the first time I used it for its original purpose.

When I crawled back into bed, happy with myself for coming up with some ideas, I started to think about how songwriting has always been so important to me, not just because I enjoyed the process, but because it started out as a way for me to express and resolve or even just emote the events of my life.  This is how it begins for many songwriters out there, often in their teens like I was, trying to make sense of everything.  Over the years the songs were like little storyboards of my daily struggles and triumphs.  Once I started thinking about myself as a potential commercial songwriter and artist, however, that changed a little.  I began to have to think about my songs in terms of how others might perceive them and whether or not they had a universal meaning or message, rather than just self-centred meanderings.  Some of the songs I wrote succeeded, I think, but eventually the idea of being a performing songwriter lost its sheen and in the last few years as I’ve mentioned, all of it has come to a standstill.

When I lay there the other night after having triumphantly found some lyrics and a new “storyboard” to follow, it hit me that I have very much missed that feeling and that I want to go back to the way it was.  Of course, so many things have happened since then and I know it won’t be the same.  But I think I have to return to my old “bedroom writing” so that I can express what I want without worry about what anyone else will think.  So chances are that whatever songs I come up with in future may never drift outside my bedroom door.  And that’s okay.

For me, songwriting has always been as natural as breathing.  I need to, as I did when I was 12, inhale life and then exhale my expression of it.

[Update:  For any of you who are interested:  I have now started a video series on my Songwriting Blog documenting the progress of the new song I’m writing.]