TIPS FOR PITCHING YOUR SONGS

I see lots of mistakes being made in regard to pitching a song. Pitching the songs can be very tricky and sensitive. Tricky because you must make sure you understand what exactly they are looking for and you pitch the right work. And sensitive, because with couple of wrong pitches you can put your name in publisher’s list of people who always send the wrong song and the publishers will never open your emails anymore. Here are some tips to increase your chances of success, to help you appear more professional, and to keep you from burning bridges:

Learn as much as you can about the artist you are pitching to before you pitch a song. Pitching a love song to Kenny Chesney is as useless as spitting into the wind. He won’t cut one. Katy Perry isn’t going to sing a song that makes her look like a weak woman. Don’t waste your time or hers by pitching her one. Learning what artists will and won’t say is crucial to success in pitching songs. Be sure you have a song that you think is perfect for that artist, not just in the ballpark.

Include a lyrics with every pitch that you e-mail and with any CD you drop off. It’s better to include it than to have someone thinking “This sounds cool, but I can’t understand it”. When you e-mail a pitch to anyone, it’s best just to attach a lyrics . Then, they have it if they need it. Don’t just “assume” your lyrics are clear or the artist or the publisher will understand, even though if it is a very simple song. Even if it’s 100% obvious they will get it, it still is a form of respect from your side to include the lyrics. And trust me, when I wear my publisher hat, I only entertain the writers who send their songs with lyrics! If one without lyrics is really good, then I email the writer and ask for the lyrics of that particular song, but not every publisher or artist would do so.
 
Don’t require the person you are pitching to have to download the song. If you attach a song in Gmail, it can be previewed without downloading. Then, if they like it, they can download it. This saves them time and space on their hard drive. Imagine if you got pitched 200 songs each day and you had to wait for each one to download and then you had several gigs of hard drive space gone. If they have to download your song, they will delete your e-mail. Make it easy on the listener and respect their time. The best way I can recommend is just to have your songs on a cloud like Dropbox or OneDrive and when ever you have the chance to pitch for a specific artist, just send them the link to that one song on the cloud. Not the whole folder of your demos, but just one or two song.
 
Include your contact info. If you pitch a CD, include your name, e-mail address and phone number on the lyrics sheet and the CD. Sometimes the two get separated. Make it easy to contact you. If you pitch by e-mail, add your contact info in the metadata of the mp3 you are pitching. Also, put the title of your song in the subject of the email. For instance, “Uptown Funk for Bruno Mars”. Do everything you can to make it EASY for them to contact you and to find that e-mail if they remember later that they want to hear your song again.
 
Don’t follow up unless you hear something from them. If they put your song on hold and a month has gone by with no response, it’s ok to check in and see if they are still considering it. Otherwise, no response means “no”. Again, imagine that you received 200 e-mails each day last week containing songs and all 400 of those people start e-mailing this week to see if you received their song. Then, you are getting 400 or more emails per day. They will contact you if they like your song. I promise. If they don’t contact you, you’re just irritating them by following up and forcing them to take the time to tell you “no”.

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.