Performing at The Listening Room, Nashville, TN 03/06/11
One of the most challenging aspects of this songwriting business occurs when NOTHING is going on with your music or writing. Your creativity may be down or sales have slacked off – heck even “listens” are at a drizzle on your Soundcloud or Reverbnation page….But having worked in the corporate world also, these down times happen in other businesses as well – just maybe in different ways. In accounting each month we had “Month-End-Close” where we would gather all the prior month’s numbers into informative reports that could be reviewed by upper management and even eventually the stockholders (if it was a public company) The rest of the month was a tine to not only get ready for the next M-E-C but it was a good time to get the workspace organized, do extra analysis work on the reports just produced or learn more about the upcoming change in the software the company was going to start using….
Right now for me at least, things are really slow. So what can I do?
* I’ve got Arnybarn’s songs uploaded to the Music Libraries. I make sure to be on top of any placement opportunities but there are not too many right now for the kind of music we have. But that can be deceiving. A song might be getting placed right now but I won’t hear about it until the cue sheet is filed with BMI.* I need to finish my copyright project I started – I created a spreadsheet of all my songs that showed the BMI information and the copyright registration number. I was surprised to find over a dozen songs I thought I had gotten registered but still had not been.
* I’ve been working on a new CD for the Fall but trying to figure out how to work with the limited budget I have for that. I need to get the tracks to the point I can take them to an engineer friend of mine so he can do the finishing mastering on them.
* Oh here’s another project. I am working on eliminating having full versions of my songs on the web and replacing them with clips. But it is a tedious time consuming process. I discovered all of my songs (and probably your songs too) have been taken from places I’ve posted and put on other websites to be downloaded for free. They are mostly foreign websites but they are there! My videos too. The websites have a disclaimer that says something like “If you are not legally supposed to download these songs – please do not do so” – like that is going to stop someone?
* I need to coordinate my mp3 and wav files in a more efficient way on my computer(s) –
There are plenty of things I can do when the creative side and business side are not demanding my time and energies!
So, today I cleaned up the office! Please leave a comment and let me know what you do to fill those down tiimes in your songwriting! Thanks!
Musically Yours!Dave
A Songwriter's Journey 