WHY YOU’RE NOT GETTING SONGS CUT?

Looking at the songwriters whom I am mentoring, and the messages and emails I receive all the time, I can say as an average, the biggest question most aspiring songwriters have is “Why am I not getting songs recorded by major artists?”
​This is a very hard question to answer because there are many factors affecting your process in getting a song, but in my experience, there are several primary reasons people don’t experience the success they want with their songs. Here they are:

Your songs aren’t good enough yet. Well, I always had been saying “write better songs”. That doesn’t mean your songs aren’t good enough, but it means you can write better songs that what your written until this point. Today, you should write a song better than what you wrote yesterday, and tomorrow you should write something better than the song you wrote today. In more than 90% of the cases I’ve encountered, this is the problem. ​

The quality of the song is not world class, but the songwriter is expecting a world class artist to record their song. Artists are looking for world class songs for their records, and there is a need for them in the market. Unless you are writing world class songs, you aren’t likely to get them to record your music by a major artist. So, if you are playing your songs for reputable industry people and not getting any action, you need to work on writing better songs.
 
You’re ignoring the market. Many people insist on writing what they like, regardless of what is going on in the market of their genre at the moment. If what you like isn’t the flavor of the month, you won’t get those songs cut, even if they are great songs. If you are writing the wrong kind of songs, you drive yourself out of the market. When songwriting is your career, you are selling a product, called “song” which you write, create and present it for making a sale. This is pretty much business to business kind of sales, in a highly competitive market. If you want to make a sale, you definitely need to understand your market, keep yourself updated about it and always be aware of the latest “news” of the market, analyze your market and produce the products that based on your analysis you are supposed to be able to make them. Maybe your market’s taste is very different than your personal taste, but you must understand that you are not writing the songs for yourself to play them at your basement, but you are writing them for your industry, hoping a major artist will record it, therefore your song must be something that can compete with the rest of products in your market.
 
You are writing things that artists don’t want to say. If you write an amazing song that no one wants to sing, it will never get recorded. One of my early “great” songs was about a boy catching his father cheating on his mom. It was not based on any sort of real experiences of my life and I totally made up the story so I could go pretty creative on it. Great song. Interesting story. Well written. Compelling melody. But who wants to get on a stage in front of 60,000 people and sing about their dad cheating on their mom? No one. Trust me. I pitched it all over the town. Make sure you are writing ideas and songs that are universal, that are in same direction as the marketing image your target artist has, and songs that make the artist look good. The song must say the things that an artist would want to sing in public. It will directly affect their image, so they are pretty careful of what they will choose. You should make it simple enough with a “positive image” that they easily pick your topic because it will help their marketing a lot.
 
You aren’t targeting well with your pitches. Writing great songs is already a very important part of this job, but that is not all. After you write some great songs, what you need to do with them? I’m glad you cared about the next step! You need to pitch them to some artist or label people, hoping they will like it and they will record it. You need to have some strategies for pitching. You can’t just throw your song on people and expect it to go well, just because you are confident that this is a good song. Pitching a great song to an artist or to the label supervisors who doesn’t cut that kind of song is a waste of time. You have to know when and what an artist is looking for and hit the bullseye with your pitch. If you have no idea what an artist does, or what they are looking for on their current record, you won’t get a cut. How do you find all of that out? Ask questions. I had someone email me and say, “Do you know what Artist X is looking for?” Turns out I had written with Artist X two weeks prior, so I knew exactly what he said he wanted. It pays to ask questions. Read interviews with the artist. Get in their head. Gather all the intel you can. Then, pitch. Pitching without all of that info can burn a bridge and waste a lot of people’s time.

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.