A Day in the Life of a Modern-Day Songwriter
When I started my music career more than a decade ago, it was as a singer/songwriter, living and working in Blackpool in the North of England. I was very driven and wrote hundreds of songs in a couple of years. It wasn’t practical for me to record and release every single song, and many of them weren’t suitable for my artist project anyway, so I was left with a bit of a conundrum: what do I do with all of these songs sitting on my hard drive? Surely they’re worth something to somebody?
That’s when I started to look at licensing my music for background use in retail stores, which gave me the most important thing at the time: a means to put clothes on my back and food in my cupboards.
Several years of currying favor with radio producers and tirelessly touring took its toll and helped me conclude that this was not the life I wanted long term — believe it or not, I’ve always been more comfortable being in the background. Writing music, on the other hand, was still something I enjoyed and found rewarding, and I continued to do this to bolster my income during the early days.
Fast-forward to today, and under the umbrella of my successful record label, publishing company and management agency, Ostereo, I have the privilege of working with some of the finest writing talent in the world, helping them secure cuts with major artists and projects.
We are, at the time of writing this article, cocooned in the legacy glow of the iconic Abbey Road Studios in London, running a three-day writing camp, Song Circle, in partnership with Warner Chappell Music, which sees more than 35 talented writers implementing some sonic alchemy to concoct the next big hits for some of the world’s biggest artists. This made me think deeper about the challenges facing today’s songwriting and production community.
What Should You Consider About Being a Songwriter Today?
Being independent can work. If you have the wherewithal and the resources to network and push your material in the right way, that could certainly be for you. For others, music publishing deals can be a great benefit. Publishers will try to, alongside ensuring your songs are properly monetized, secure exploitation of your written music such as synchronizations with TV/film/ads, which can be very lucrative. They may also pay you an advance for signing to them as a writer, either exclusively or for specific songs they wish to represent, giving you something like a salary for your work as a writer.
But getting on publishers’ radars isn’t always easy, so it’s important to present yourself correctly. You can do this by networking with fellow writers and collaborating as much as possible, as well as ensuring you keep a meticulous log of all the times your music is used and making sure you’ve been paid for those uses.
The Rolling Stone Culture Council is an invitation-only community for Influencers, Innovators and Creatives. Do I qualify?
New technological developments are also a consideration for a modern-day songwriter. How will AI production and writing tools impact this creative community? The truth is, technology has always been a consideration in songwriting, and many key developments have shaped the process over the decades.
But, in my view, there is no replacement for the human element in music; the heart, the experience and the emotion. It’s all so key. That is why I feel that camps like Song Circle are so important for the music industry — to maintain the long-standing tradition of human songwriting, which I think will always prevail.
How Do You Earn Money as a Songwriter?
In a number of ways, firstly through a music publishing deal and any associated advances as above. Ensuring your music is registered with a performing rights organization (PRS, ASCAP, etc.,) will also mean you are collecting public performance royalties whenever your song is performed on TV, radio or in concerts—which can be very lucrative.
At the moment, the majority of streaming income is paid to recording artists and their labels (around 85 percent). This is in part, as Sentric describes in this article, due to the historic thinking that “record labels had a much bigger overhead in breaking artists than publishers did.”
However, many major platforms have now agreed to increase the rates paid to writers and publishers to 15.35 percent. So it isn’t all doom and gloom, and as these platforms continue to develop and, dare I say, Web 3 technology becomes more widely adopted, we could expect this to continuously improve for writers.
I often get asked: “If I’m musically talented but don’t want to be a famous artist, what can I do?” The answer is that there are many more people behind the songs we hear on the charts than the artists who release them. That’s true of music executives and a myriad of other professionals.
However, in my view, songwriters, lyricists and producers are the unsung heroes of our favorite records. Competition is undoubtedly fierce and the obstacles many — but if you are talented and have the means to demonstrate that to the right people, then you could well be (at least in part) responsible for the next smash-hit, without ever stepping into the spotlight.