Save the Songwriter: Interviews

Coming soon - a gear guru, a publishing connection, a famous songwriter

Derek Sivers - Interview by Diana B

Derek Sivers is the founder of CD Baby and HostBaby. More than 200,000 independent record artists use cdbaby.com and hostbaby.com to sell, distribute or host their music. A musician himself, Derek has also been a musicians' advocate, sharing everything he's learned about marketing and promotion. His personal site at http://sivers.org has amazing tips and advice.

Q. With CD Baby and HostBaby, you have created an extraordinary online platform for unsigned record artists. What was your inspiration for this?

Necessity. I never meant to start a business. I was just selling my own music 10 years ago, and built this whole wonderful system to do it. Then my friend started asking if I could sell theirs too.... Now 10 years later this little hobby of mine has paid $80 million dollars directly to musicians, with no labels or distributors in between. It's really amazing.

Q. Not every good performer is a good writer, nor is every good writer a good performer. Do you have any suggestions as to how a writer (i.e. lyricist and/or composer) should proceed in order to get their songs covered?

Work backwards. See http://sivers.org/call-the-destination and
http://sivers.org/get-specific First, figure out exactly who should be recording your song. Do your research and find out what songs that artist has recorded by other writers. Then Google those songwriters and song titles to see if interviews have revealed how that writer got that cut. If nothing is found online, ask Diana if you can contact the writer in the name of savethesongwriter.com to interview them about how that artist chose to record their song. Once you've done this research (which really only took you an hour, tops) write down at least five different ways you can reach this artist the way they like to be reached. Don't stop at one idea. Come up with five and do at least three of them. Persistence really pays off.

Q. With regard to CD Baby and various digital distribution avenues, how are the songwriters compensated, that is, are they compensated by the distributors, or by the producers of the CD?

The producer/artist of the album is paid everything, in full. Then it's the producer/artist's responsibility to pay the publisher, Harry Fox or the writer directly.

Q. If songwriters' publishing is being handled by Harry Fox, how does this affect their royalties from CD Baby and Digital distributors - again, would they be collected from the distributor or from the indie record label?

No difference. That's between the artist/producer and the publisher/writer. If the publisher/writer chose to have Harry Fox represent them, well then. that's just another middleman who needs to get paid. But I think many artist/producers are paying the publisher/writers directly with no middlemen these days.

Either way : the seller (iTunes) or distributor (CD Baby) doesn't get
involved in that stuff. The artist/producer that signed up to CD Baby with the final sound recording has assured us that they are responsible for taking care of all royalties.

Q. While becoming known is a desireable goal for a performer, many excellent songwriters will never be famous, nor is that necessarily a goal. How do you suggest a songwriter proceed in order to have their songs covered and develop a source of income?

Be where music is being made. I used to work at Warner/Chappell Music Publishing in New York City. One of our most successful writers was only a lyrics-and-melody guy. So he would hang out at studios where many of the producer types, especially in R&B, had leftover grooves and tracks that they had never turned into songs. He'd just say, "Toss me your leftovers. Let me see if I can turn it into something even more valuable for you. If you don't like my ideas, no problem, it's still your track." He'd just take home a copy of their groove/track for the night and sing to it, seeing if he could turn into into a cool song. About one out of every five songs he co-wrote like this was impressive enough that the producer liked it, and would often get it cut by whatever artist he was working with.

On the flip side, if you're more of a music-only person, not so into writing lyrics or melodies, co-write with recording artists, letting them come up with the words and melody to your tracks. They'll be happier with that because they can sing words they wrote, and the song is almost sure to be cut that way.

Q. Finally, what words of advice do you have for the new, up-and-coming songwriter?

Commit to constantly improving. Don't think your songs are etched in stone. Every song can be improved. Changing a single note or word can make or break a song. Read all songwriting books. Read Paul Zollo's interviews with the legendary songwriters. Read Jack Perricone's book about melody. Read slowly, thinking how these ideas can not only inspire new songs, but improve your existing songs.

Never underestimate the power of an arrangement. Prince's song "Kiss" is loved by millions because it had such a unique arrangement. Play it as a typical bar-band blues song and it's completely unimpressive.
Maybe you've got great songs that aren't getting the attention they deserve because you didn't continue your creativity into the arrangement and instrumentation. People think they can hear through things like that, but they usually can't, so it's up to the writer. Maybe try never calling a song done until you've recorded it in five radically different arrangements.

Which comes to the last point : have a home studio. If you need to spend a ton of money at someone else's studio every time you want to record your songs, it'll hold you back. Spending just $1000 on equipment (decent mic, compressor, input adaptor, and software), then taking even 10 hours to learn how to run your home multi-track studio setup well, will pay off immensely.