songwriting
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They’re the keys to a solid business plan: a sound product, an understanding of the target customer, focused marketing and country music.
That’s right — country music. Nashville songwriters have over the last decade amplified a secondary source of revenue by giving more in-the-round performances beyond Music City’s club circuit, particularly for America’s corporate movers and shakers. Sometimes it’s a hometown gig at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe or The Listening Room for 50-75 staffers with a company enjoying an entertainment break during a conference. In other instances, the composers may travel out of town to perform for a dozen senior members of different companies that are engaged in a leadership exercise.
Regardless of a company’s purpose, it gives songwriters — who create their material in small rooms — a chance to see their songs at work in front of an audience and to get paid for the privilege.
“A lot of songwriters are doing it because they’re not making money on getting cuts anymore,” says songwriter Hillary Lindsey (“Blue Ain’t Your Color,” “Jesus, Take the Wheel”). “Even if you get the album cut, if you don’t have a single, you’re not making money. So a lot of people are hustling and getting a lot of these gigs. If you do enough, I think you can make some money.”
The development was not born in a songwriting room. Instead, it came indirectly from the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp., which is tasked with marketing Music City as a destination for both vacation and business travel. Songwriters are “a secret weapon of Nashville,” says NCVC CEO Butch Spyridon. Roughly 20 years ago, he rounded up three writers — Brett James (“I Hold On,” “Blessed”), Rivers Rutherford (“Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You,” “Real Good Man”) and Tim Nichols(“Live Like You Were Dying,” “Heads Carolina, Tails California”) — and hit a handful of other markets, attempting to entice convention bookers to plot their events in Middle Tennessee.
“The irony was it was so good, so cool and so special,” Spyridon says. “The client base responded better than if they were seeing the artists. It resonated out of the gate, and so then we just never stopped.”
Around 10 years ago, some of the executives who experienced those songwriter-in-the-round performances started booking them for their own corporate events. The price was much less than booking, say, Tim McGraw, and the event proved more personal and intimate, as attendees heard familiar songs in the vocal-and-guitar format in which they were originally conceived. While prices vary, the typical writer might get $5,000, so a company could conceivably book a four-person event for $20,000 and minimal production costs, far cheaper than a corporate McGraw gig.
“Not only that, you can get the writers that wrote most of the Tim McGraw hits,” says songwriter Rob Hatch (“I Don’t Dance,” “If Heaven Wasn’t So Far Away”), who co-founded a songwriter booking agency, Entersong, with Jerrod Niemann and Indiana-based entrepreneur Steve Stewart this year. The company has over 50 writers on its roster, and bookings can range from appearances at established venues to informal dates at backyard barbecues or house parties.
“COVID-19 created a situation where people couldn’t go out and go to concerts,” Hatch says. “A lot of the private concerts popped up more because they couldn’t go anywhere else.”
Like any other performer, songwriters determine the workload that suits them. Ashley Gorley (“You Proof,” “You Should Probably Leave”) takes out-of-town dates only if they’re with fellow writers who are already friends and/or it’s in a location where he and his wife would like to vacation. Chris DeStefano (“At the End of a Bar,” “Something in the Water”) is more aggressive.
“I try to do as much of it as possible,” he says. “It’s a great way of reaching fans and [a chance to] do some traveling, too, which I go do a lot of times. I get to bring my wife, and that’s always great. It’s working vacations, but also, it’s a way of really communicating directly with fans. And any opportunity I get to do that is some of the best parts of what I do.”
But a number of writers have also found that the shows can become too much of a good thing, as they start eating into their family time or damaging their creativity in the writing room.
“They are good for a songwriter to get some hard cash because our money is so delayed, the way we get paid,” says Jessi Alexander (“Never Say Never,” “I Drive Your Truck”). “If you’re going to pay me to come sing five songs with my friends, I’m going to do it, but I found that it was really starting to disrupt my writing — go play a gig, get home late at night, start all over again.”
Some of the gigs are ideal — Corey Crowder (“Famous Friends,” “Minimum Wage”) did one for Waldorf Astoria Hotels in Hawaii — and others have ranged from a trucking tire company that employed Track45 to a winery that booked Hunter Phelps (“wait in the truck,” “Thinking ’Bout You”). Another songwriter booking agency, Mike Severson’s Songwriter City, lists a bundle of clients — including Morgan Stanley, AT&T and Amazon — on its website.
In the end, the trend is one that takes advantage of the most unique feature of Music City’s creative class, providing an extra income stream to songwriters and setting the community apart in the business world.
“This kind of shows who we are,” Spyridon says. “You clear away all the clutter, and there’s a heart and soul, and it comes from the songwriter.”
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In the 65th Annual Grammy nominations, which were announced last week, Jay-Z is competing with himself for song of the year. He is nominated for co-writing his wife Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” and also DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” on which he is one of the featured artists.
Two songwriters – Brandi Carlile and D’Mile – achieved double nominations for song of the year last year – when the Recording Academy expanded the number of nominations in this category to 10. The expansion obviously makes it easier to achieve double nominations. Still, at this point, the list of songwriters with two songs nominated for song of the year in the same year is fairly exclusive – just 12 individual songwriters or songwriting teams have accomplished the feat.
Three songwriting teams have done this – Burt Bacharach & Hal David, Dino Fekaris & Freddie Perren and Elton John & Tim Rice. John and Rice are also the only songwriters who were born outside of the U.S. who have done it.
Carlile is the only female songwriter who has done it.
Three songwriters — Jimmy Webb, Bobby Russell and Michael Jackson — have achieved the feat with a pair of songs they wrote entirely by themselves – a practice that has fallen out of fashion.
Webb is the youngest songwriter to achieve the feat. The prodigy was just 21 when he did it. The oldest? Johnny Mercer, who was 54.
We’ll find out if either of Jay-Z’s songs wins for song of the year on Feb. 5, 2023 when the 65th annual Grammy Awards are presented at Crypto.com Arena (formerly Staples Center) in Los Angeles.
Here’s a complete list of songwriters who have received two Grammy nominations for song of the year in the same year, working backwards:
In early October, Lil Yachty uploaded the 83-second track “Poland” to SoundCloud along with a grumpy message: “STOP LEAKING MY SHIT.” “Poland” consists of two keening hooks and some slack rhymes; a veteran publishing executive calls it “an idea, almost a tweet,” more than a song.
Either way, it’s a hit — it reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and it’s part of a larger trend: The average length of popular songs has been shrinking steadily for years. A 2018 study by San Francisco-based engineer Michael Tauberg concluded that songs on the Billboard Hot 100 shed around 40 seconds since 2000, falling from 4:10-ish to roughly 3:30. The average length of the top 50 tracks on Billboard‘s year-end Hot 100 in 2021 was even less, a mere 3:07. (Though this is a simple average, whereas Tauberg’s calculation was weighted by weeks spent on the chart.)
“Everyone’s aware of it — it’s a reaction to the culture of soundbites that we moved towards,” says Vincent “Tuff” Morgan, vp of A&R at the indie publisher peermusic. “I have producers in the studio this week just going through and making songs shorter.”
In this climate, writers are increasingly willing to ditch a third chorus and a pre-chorus — the musical alley-oop that sets up the hook’s slam dunk — according to the analytics company Hit Songs Deconstructed. And the portion of sub-three-minute top 10 hits ballooned from just 4% in 2016 to 38% so far in 2022. “Over the last two years, as I get demos back from artists, they’re consistently down to two minutes and 30 seconds or even two minutes,” says Caterina Nasr, senior manager of A&R at Elektra Entertainment. “Artists feel like they can express themselves quicker.”
Shorter songs aren’t exactly a new trend. Back in the early 1960s, little miracles of concision like The Chiffons “He’s So Fine” (1:52) topped the Hot 100 and The Beatles rose to international fame by releasing a series of snub-nosed pop missiles. More recently, Piko-Taro’s “PPAP (Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen)” made history as the shortest Hot 100 entry ever (45 seconds) in 2016. The following year, XXXTentacion‘s 17, which cycles through 11 songs in just 21 minutes, became a streaming sensation. In 2018, Travis Scott effectively mashed three 90-second songs into the massively successful “Sicko Mode.”
If the focus on brevity in the early 1960s was driven by the pace of AM radio, the streaming economy imposes its own pressures on song length. One theory holds that a concise track is more likely to spur multiple listens. “There’s charm to a short song because the person hits repeat — play it again, play it again,” according to Mitch Allan, a longtime writer-producer (Demi Lovato, Kelly Clarkson).
The other side of the same coin: “People are acutely aware of skip rates and how that relates to success on streaming services,” says Talya Elitzer, a former Capitol Records A&R who co-founded the indie label Godmode. Tracks with lower skip rates are prioritized by the platforms, and Elitzer believes that “a short song is less likely to be skipped.”
Most importantly, song snippets resonate with a generation of listeners used to short-form video apps. “To me this really started with the Vine era and Instagram,” says writer-producer David Harris (H.E.R., Snoh Aalegra). Brief clips have achieved a new level of commercial resonance in the music industry thanks to TikTok, where users repeatedly seize on fragments of unfinished singles and incorporate them into videos, making a mockery of the idea that a popular track must include a verse and a hook.
“Generally a song that pops off on the platform is based around a little moment,” says Elie Rizk, a writer, producer and multi-instrumentalist (Mazie, Remi Wolf). “Subconsciously you think about that: ‘Let’s pack a track with moments and try to hit the jackpot.’ I don’t feel the need to repeat a section three times — they’ve already heard that part; it doesn’t matter.”
What’s the difference between an explosive moment and a song? Since 2020, if not before, a heap of young acts have gone viral with the former and then scrambled to transform them into the latter — to build a full track around the snippet that captivated TikTok. Examples include Will Paquin’s flashy “Chandelier” (85 million), David Kushner’s woebegone “Miserable Man” (73 million), and Avenue Beat‘s goofy “F2020” (54 million).
As singles get shorter, though, the gap between a song and a hooky fragment begins to lose meaning. “To a lot of people, I think the snippet [they encounter on TikTok] is the song,” says Bart Schoudel, a longtime engineer and vocal producer (Pop Smoke, Selena Gomez).
Kuya Magik, a producer and DJ with more than 11 million TikTok followers, agrees. “If you go to a club and you watch people dance, they only dance to the 15 seconds of a song that’s famous on TikTok,” he says. “For the rest of it, they just sit there.”
For now, platforms like Spotify count 30 seconds of listening as a full play that triggers a royalty payout, so it makes sense to expand a musical idea to that length. But a generation native to TikTok may not require even 30 seconds to engage with the music. With that in mind, it’s easy to imagine that the length of singles will continue to shrink.
When a short verse goes viral on TikTok, “if that’s what the artist wrote and that’s what’s being used [on the platform], who’s to say that’s not the song?” asks Daniel Sander, chief commercial officer for the music-technology company Feature.FM. “The question is: How do you monetize that differently?”