Contrary to popular belief, songwriting business is not a joke and not an easy task. This is a business with the same concept as “invention”, “copyrights”, “trademark” and “ownership”. Professional songwriters think like that. Before you became a professional songwriter, you might spent a lot of time in your home; recording a lot of songs, writing lyrics that for you do not make a lot of importance.
Well, a lot of people can even complain why in the first place you have that hobby? The truth is that there are people in this world that are born to love music more than anyone else. This is where songwriters belong. For example, I completed an engineering job but I still love writing songs. Before; songwriting is a hobby but now it’s a profession.
Before I write songs for nothing, just to enjoy my pasttime and some original songs to try with my band. Its different now. I write songs for a living. I treat the songwriting process as strict as any other business processes. I am concern how my clients respond to my songs. I am concern about their reactions. I am concern about the overall quality of songs. I am concern about the marketability of my songs. Professional songwriters are very different from amateur songwriters because:
1.) Professional songwriters write songs with a purpose and a marketing objective. For example, why do you write that song in the first place? Professional songwriters answer it because they feel it has marketing potential to succeed within a young set of music consumers or old listeners or even a very specific set of audience.
For example, the songs that are performed by Justin Bieber are designed to reached a younger set of music consumers (e.g. teens) as compared to songs that are performed by Foo Fighters or Aerosmith. If you want to be a pro songwriter, start writing a song with a purpose and marketing objective in mind. Who’s your targeted audience?
2.) Professional songwriters never waste a good tune in mind. For example, if I happen to pickup a guitar and start strumming beats. I sometimes end up composing a great tune. I will immediately take a great opportunity of recording it. It is why I sometimes have a casette recorder nearly accessible to me so that I can record the tune or load up a demo in my DAW. The purpose is simple – not to forget that tune. No matter how good will be the tune, there is a strong tendency that you will forget it. You might heard stories of legendary songwriters composing the tune from their dream (while they are sleeping) and then woke up to record the tune in the cassette.
Guitar and paper during a songwriting process