Music Clout. Seriously?

Wow. Same junk, new name: Taxi. Sonicbids. Reverb Nation. G2.fm. Music Clout. Companies preying on gullible artists, asking them to pay for exposure or concerts or song placement or whatever. Will Music Clout succeed? My guess is yes. Why? Because most artists are looking for a pipe dream: the easy way to musical success. Don't get me wrong: I'm tempted by the same things.

This Music Clout-sort of a business model works on numbers: get enough artists to sign up (IE: "buy in") and, for every submission from every artist, the company makes bank. The only cost to the company is the up-front cost in convincing songwriters and bands of the illusion that *their* organization can *truly* "make" a band - make them lots of money - with one of their "opportunities".

Songwriters and bands, listen up:

NEVER PAY SOMEBODY UP FRONT FOR A CHANCE TO GET HEARD BY A PARTICULAR PERSON, AGENCY, VENUE, OR LABEL.

It's been said that anything worth having takes work to get. It's true. 99.99% of the time, these companies will steal your money and leave you in the same place you started: nowhere. You can't build a music career simply by submitting innumerable entries to virtual businesses. You need to be *there*, in person, pounding the *pavement*. Physical. Work. Sweat.

Wow. Venting. Seriously.

Now Serving BMI Artists...

I just received an email today from my performing rights organization (PRO), BMI Inc., that they just signed a deal with Spotify that pays BMI artists for music streamed from the Spotify application. Awesome. So feel free to stream away those Jay Mathes tunes in Spotify, knowing that I'm actually getting paid when you do!

Music Licensing Opportunities

Over the last few weeks, I've been exploring new ways to generate some cash from the music that I write and record. The good news? There are a lot of ways to generate the money, as I have found. The bad news? It seems like every other artist has discovered the same thing that I have. I've found a bunch of websites that claim to "specialize" in what is called song placement or music licensing - places called "pitching houses" (basically just a new name for a music publisher). The problem is that I'm having trouble navigating this over-crowded sea of music speculators.

For lack of a better comparison - actually, no, I think it's a perfect comparison - the digital music licensing world looks *exactly* like the California gold rush days: everybody is vying for the same territory, the "mining" technology (a content delivery system) is readily available to almost all artists, and the value of the commodity (good, quality music) is fluctuating based on its availability.

So what does this mean for my music and the music that Swiftly Running Records represents? It means that now, more than ever before, I have to rely on personal contacts to exploit song placement opportunities. And the best way to continue to establish those relationships is to be where those decision-makers are - to live where the music supervisors live, eat where they eat, attend the events they attend, invite them over for dinner, take them out for coffee. I know a heck of a lot of them live in L.A., a few in Nashville (I think), and maybe some in NYC(?). But I'm not so sure I'm willing to relocate just so that I can pitch my songs. (Maybe I can get somebody else to do it[?].)

I want to play. I want to perform the music I write. I want to be on stage. I'm just looking for a way to make enough money to keep doing what I love.