5 WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES IF YOU LIVE OUTSIDE A MUSIC CENTER

​As a mentor and coach living in Singapore – which is not exactly the biggest music town in the world – I am often helping many songwriters that don’t live in a music town too. Natural being based in a city that is known to be music center, it can help your career a lot but if you are not based in any of “music cities” it still is perfectly okay. Nowadays with all the technology you can be completely present in a place without physically being there! Here are a few of my suggestions for getting deals and cuts while you are not living in a music city. 

​Visit as often as you can. Even if it’s just once a year. Even if it’s not possible to literally keep going to the music cities, some wisely planned “face time” with your key contacts can help you make progress and make new connections and strengthen the existing ones. Just letting people see your face and hear what’s going on with you can make a difference. Human being tends to forget about others if they don’t keep the connections. Everyone once in a while just drop and email or give a quick video call and say hi. Let your name to be under “alive” status in their mind.

​Establish a presence on social media. I ran into a fellow writer one time when I had more going on than I had ever had at once. When he saw me, he said “Where have you been? Did you drop off the face of the earth?” That was a wake-up call. I realized that I had to keep people updated on my successes. No one else is going to do that. I started doing Facebook and Instagram posts about my successes and the next time I saw him, he said “Man, you’re on fire!”. Nothing had changed with my situation. I had just let the world know about it. Same as what I mentioned earlier, don’t let people to forget you. Put updates about yourself and your work out there and let them to see your presence. Not to force your presence on them by keep sending emails or messages but just casually leave the updates on social media and be sure the people who must see it, will see!
 
Write with people “in town”. The more you can write with people who live in the music centre of your choice, the more you have legs not the ground working your music. Writing with people based in the towns gives you most of the advantages of being in the town without actually physically being there. Sounds like having some sort of superpower! And, you don’t have to write with them in person. You can write by Skype or by e-mail. No one will ever need to know how you wrote it. They just want a hit song.
 
Work on writing better songs. I preach this all the time and people have a hard time believing it, but if I hear a song that I believe is a hit, I will help the writer of that song get it to the people that can make something happen. In fact, any legitimate person in the business would do the same. The key to making things happen is having a song that is undeniably better than anything else in the pile. everything you do to help you write better songs increases your chances exponentially. Writing songs is the very nature of this business and if you don’t have great songs in hand, you have nothing to do business with. No matter how good you are or what your position in the industry is, you still can get better and better daily. The key is constant practice and writing as much as you can.
 
Build your team methodically. Your team includes your co-writers, your PRO, publishers, song pluggers, artists, managers, etc. Anyone you know personally that could help you get something done is “on your team”. Understanding that all these people are on your team and you win and lose all together is very important. Be a team player and again I insist, understand that people on your team will win when you win, and they lose when you lose. And vice versa. So, the whole team must help each other to win. Teamwork is very important in this business and unfortunately, I see most of failure cases in music game comes from lack of teamwork.

Author

Hangi Tavakoli is our in-house established and professional music producer with more than 17 years of experience in songwriting, music production, mix and mastering. He has produced more than 3,000 and written more than 4,800 published songs to-date, including some major hits in international scale.