JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Are Our Ranks Shrinking?

I've noticed it, too. I came on the internet in Feb. '99. I'd been writing for nearly 20 years by then as well as voraciously collecting records. I'd say it took me 12 years to write a single, decent piece that was cohesive and had meaning. In the interim, I was bad and I knew it. I had no commercial aspirations, i just wanted to be good. So I worked at it.

About a year after I came on the net I started getting contacted by composers, some from Europe. They all said that songwriting sites were a wasteland. There's very little sense of getting better. There used to be people who would post stuff daily, none of it had any chance of ever becoming a song at all, let alone one an artist would sing.

I say this only because the availability and convenience of making something public does NOT increase the talent of those who want it public. A very, very small percentage of people have creative talent. Those people are split up anong architects, dancers, painters, poets, composers etc.
The internet has not created more creativity, it just exposed mediocrity.

It's really easy to write a terrible lyric. (Ask any rapper). It takes talent plus years of devotion to write a good one, let alone a great one. Without that, these sites will be dinosaurs in a short time.