IF YOU ARE A WRITER, YOUR TIME IS BETTER SPENT ON A CLEVER LYRICS THAN A CLEVER TWEET

Last year a publisher friend asked me to write with a new singer/songwriter who had recently moved to town. The first thing out of the publisher’s mouth was “this guy has over 80,000 Instagram followers.” Not that that the artist was a great writer or singer or guitar player. The publisher was blown away with all the Instagram and Twitter followers. So, we set a date for the writing appointment, I remember it because it happened to fall on Valentine’s day. Not that it particularly matters to this account. The artist arrived before me and when I walked into the writing room he was on his computer and couldn’t wait to show me how many comments he just got on a recent Facebook post. 

Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that’s fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.
​Bryan Adams

That should have been a sign. He was so proud of himself for writing such an incredible post that morning while waiting on me. I pulled out my laptop and after some get-to-know-ya conversation, I asked him if he had any song ideas. “Well no” he said. “I was up late last night updating my website.” So, I then asked him what he’d like to write about. He stared off into the distance for a second. And then his phone goes off with a loud DING. “Excuse me” he said. “That’s my Twitter messages DING”. Then he gets a phone call and excuses himself and leaves the room to take the call. When he returns to the room, A friend of mine, a pro songwriter, who took his time to sit down with this new-to-town songwriter, had packed up his guitar and was pulling out of the parking lot. You see, my time is valuable, and I headed over to join a couple great writers who invited me earlier to write with them, but I had told them I was booked already. I never heard from that young writer again and neither has anyone else. And I doubt any of us will ever hear from him. Not unless he decides to start spending his time on the important things like respecting others time, writing songs and working on his musicianship. You can have all the Instagram followers in the world but if your music sucks no one will buy your records or care about your music!

Author

Hangi Tavakoli is our in-house established and professional music producer with more than 15 years of experience in music production, mix and mastering, recording engineering, live sound designing/engineering, lyrics writing and music arrangement. He has produced more than 800 and written more than 2000 published songs to-date, including some major hits in international scale.