How To Become A Successful Performing Artist In The New Millennium – Part One

“The great thing about rock and roll is that someone like me can be a star.” – Elton John

It shouldn’t be news to anyone in the music business today that the smart (and maybe the only) money is in live performance, merchandising (which is kind of tied into live performance) and publishing (and all of its Constitutionally-guaranteed income streams). The bottom line: If you want to make a living these days on the artist side of the music business, you need to write and publish your own songs and perform them from the stage in an entertaining manner. Here’s a step-by-step list of how you might go about doing that – starting with the live performance side. (Note: There are probably a couple hundred other ways to accomplish this – but the odds are better this way. You’ll see why.)

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Make Your Lyrics Shine

The human voice is one of the most powerful instruments in music. Lyrics are a critical piece of songwriting, and the process of writing these lyrics can be one of the most difficult tasks that any songwriter will encounter. Like any other art form, songwriting is a powerful way to communicate with an audience and evoke emotion or convey a message. However, only some songwriters manage to accomplish this task. So how do you make your lyrics shine?

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Finding Your Natural Audience

Songwriters, do you know who your natural audience is?

Your songs exist at a point within or outside the commercial mainstream. If they fall in the mainstream, they are similar to other songs, and are most likely to be embraced by a pop audience. If they hang out on the fringes, they are discernible from other songs, and are most likely to be noticed by a niche audience. The pop audience is larger and more accepting, the niche audience smaller and more discriminating. Each has its pros and cons.

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Getting Into Songwriting w/ Triple Platinum Songwriter Drew Lawrence

Over the last three years the career growth of one musician in particular has been extremely fun to watch. Los Angeles based songwriter, Drew Lawrence has balanced music, life, family, and bills to build a sustainable career in music over that span. A classically trained Pianist and graduate of Berklee College of Music, Drew has a career record that includes gigging around LA, a few west coast and US tours, teaching music lessons to families in Beverly Hills and a more recent focus in songwriting for heavy hitters like Christina Perri, Kelly Clarkson and a ton of up and comers.

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Eight Ways To Compose Music More Effectively

We’ve all been there. Struggling to come up with a melody or working out that perfect ending for your song. This is one of the most frustrating aspects of composing music, especially when you are working towards a deadline. This article contains a few suggestions on how to compose more effectively.

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Half a Million Downloads and 500,000 Dilemmas

Allow me to start at the end: And in the end, I feel conflicted about the project.  As I continue to build my songwriting career, I feel encouraged by the numbers.  500,000 people downloaded my music (and not the easy way - they had to create a profile on a single clunky website to get the songs).  400,000 people have watched my YouTube videos. I don’t care what anybody says - you don’t get those numbers with crappy music.  Someday, maybe, people will say, “Man, did you know that Dave Hahn had a million YouTube views before he ever had a hit?” On the other hand, in the two years I’ve been working on the project, I’ve made $673.02.

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How I’m Building a Career as a Songwriter

You know what I would have loved? I would have loved to have been part of the Brill Building history between the 1940s and the 1960s – where some of America’s most popular songs were written. If you don’t know the history, check it out on Wikipedia. Just a taste:

By 1962 the Brill Building contained 165 music businesses: A musician could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building.

Or you know what also would be have great? Jingle writing between the 1940s and 1980s. What a sweet time to be a songwriter or a studio musician. Writing songs, recording them, hearing yourself on the radio, collecting big royalty checks – man, that would have been cool. But, alas, that era was very short-lived and we were not lucky enough to be a part of it. So what do we do? I’m not satisfied to just throw my hat in and say that it’s too hard to work as a songwriter. There are people out there doing it, and if they can do it so can I. I’m going for it.

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How to Choose the Best Songs for Your Album

If you’re heading into the studio to record an album, you should go in with plenty of songs to spare. Sometimes, things don’t work as well in recorded format, sometimes your tastes/ideas change. At any rate, going in with more ideas allows you to choose the very best songs for your album. Besides, it’s always better to have too many songs to choose from than not enough. But how do you decide which songs should stay and which should go?

This is what I recommend that you do: Treat it like a songwriting contest.

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How to compose in 5 steps

I was asked to tutor a musician in my area who never faced composing from scratch.
Of course, there are several approaches to composition, but here’s what you will refer to as a composer:

- Harmony
- Melody
- Rhythm( and time )

These are the fundamentals of music. You can order these three milestones as you like, merge some together or even ignore some of them. A lot of composer experimented pieces with no harmony and/or no melody or no time and to me that is where music is going, to some degree.

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Top 10 Rules For Better Songwriting

I am a songwriter. I typically work from home using a small studio set up and have been fortunate enough to have written, co-written or produced many songs that have been commercially released.

I am also the founder of Audio Rokit, which is a song submission platform helping bands and artists get their music heard by top industry professionals. http://www.audiorokit.co.uk.

I thought I could share some of my own personal song writing tips and tricks. These 10 rules have helped me and I hope that they help you also. Please feel free to add to my list!

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DIY Promotion, Songwriting and Pricing w/ 3OH!3

When you think of DIY bands, chances are the acts that come to your mind are not on the billboard charts. At least not yet. When we first reached out to 3OH!3 for an interview, we had our doubts as well. However, as you will see below, 3OH!3 was born and raised in DIY ethos and continue to move forward with the same mentality even today.

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The Adventures Of Co-writing

I was sixteen when I walked into my first pro studio. I was there to co-write with a producer who had been signed by Capital Records as an artist earlier in his career. It was a big deal! He came in sat down and after some brief chitchat he asked me what song ideas I had been working on. I showed him a couple and off he went taking my ideas into whatever direction he chose. Whenever I would speak up with an idea he would dismiss it because, after all, I was just a punk kid. That was my first real co-writing experience. It was a bit rough to say the least. Since then I’ve had the opportunity to co-write with all kinds of people and it has honestly been one of the most musically rewarding things that I have ever experienced.

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The Death of the Bridge

Many of my all-time favorite songs are “growers” - album tracks that don’t really grab you the first few spins, but eventually dig their hooks in and don’t let go. Few artists these days have the luxury of writing growers, because listeners aren’t willing to invest that kind of time. Unless the artist is proven to deliver, the listener will tune out and move on. While I’m a huge fan of the album format, it’s hard to deny the shifting focus from albums to individual songs. Every one of those songs needs to grab the listener’s attention and hold it until the last note - preferably longer! In order for your songs to be grabbers rather than growers, they must have clear and familiar structures.

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Viral, Schmiral (‘Greatness’ Pt. 2)

Baimurat Allaberiyev – a YouTube sensation – has a major record deal but still has few teeth, literally. And those teeth are planted on the cutting edge of the latest boom-and-bust trend in the music industry: viral-video microfame.

So, let’s get real about the sobering statistics of enduring Web 2.0 success among music artists. To that end, I will explore the verities of the viral-video trend.

But first, this exploration is not meant as a discouragement. It’s simply a reality check. Like a sound check, it gets us in tune, so we can perform at our best. And, as with the old industry, the new music model presents real, if limited, opportunities for enduring success. So, as in the past, the motivation for the serious artist is the very challenge of the overwhelming game itself.

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