Originally Posted by Marc Barnette
Everett,

I will go back to what someone said in 1998 to a pretty high level panel discussion in Nashville. "In the future, songwriters are going to have to get used to doing without royalties, because they are not going to be there."

That is now happening with lisences. They are pretty much gone because no one does high run CD's anymore. They order 100 at a time, and get them fairly quickly if they need more. But most CD's are now givaways, to advertise for gigs. And one of the reasons they are less likely to record outside material. When it is going to cost you money with little or no chance or any return, you are going to record your own.

That is what you have been seeing in different ways. The singer who no longer wants to record your songs, the problems with lisencing,etc. The outside song is a thing of the past. Gonna have to change the dynamic of how you approach it. Cause in the eyes of most artists, that has already changed.

MAB


If this is the way it is going than the industry will slowly die.
It has been my experience that rarely does the best singer, the best musician, the best writer, come all rolled up in one person, one unit, one package. It happens once in a while but not often. Usually the great musicians can't write or sing well, the best singers can't write or play well, and the best writers can't sing or play well, so if singer/songwriters can manage to do it all, even if they are only fair and not great, they will rule the roost. The biggest losers in all of this will be the listening audience, but they may not even notice because they are being slowly down graded to accept worst and worst every day.

Maybe what you will see are bands formed around writers, after all the songs are the most important. Great singers will hire great musicians and look for writers to write for them. Wait! Wasn't that what Nashville did in the past, only then the major labels did the organizing and controlling. Maybe what goes around comes around, lets hope so for the sake of music lovers.