Hi Lyle,

I can add my 2 cents to this thread. I have been a member of Taxi for some years now and initially, like Vicki, I didn't get any forwards. However, after I took the critiques to heart and worked on improving the songs I put out, I started getting a lot of forwards. This means that your songs are at least getting listened to the people who ran the listings in the first place. That is a huge step from sending out unsolicited material and the screeners at Taxi are all industry people. If you have the songs, they will do their best for you.

In many ways, getting critiques from pros like the screeners at Taxi is a wake up call. You often don't have a realistic idea of where your songs are in relation to what is expected until you get some of these critiques...and you do have to be better than a lot of the stuff on the radio because of no connections.

I think sometimes these boards are misleading because I see where people have a rose-tinted view of their songs when everybody comes out and says 'Oh this song is so great' when in reality it may be just good. I have gone to too many songwriter workshops to not know by now that....good is not good enough. People can become complacent about their songs and not be pushed to rewrite and improve them in cases like this which is not helping the writer at all.

FYI if you pay the first year's subscription at Taxi, thereafter $300 will buy 2 years of membership at a time which is not bad.

Another route I use, is to pay for professional evaluations of my songs to determine where I need to improve and which ones I should demo. You can get this service from Taxi as well, I currently am using the 'coaches'(again industry people) at SongU.

As with everything there is a learning curve and songwriting is no exception. The beauty of it though is that the more you acknowledge this and try to improve to reach 'the bar', the more likely you are to actually get there. What is ultimately important though is that you need to know where that bar is if you are going to have a chance of hitting it.

As one Grammy winning songwriter stood up and said at one of the Taxi conventions, Hits are not WRITTEN, they're REWRITTEN.

Cheers,

Rachel

http://www.broadjam.com/rachelkerr

As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the things you didn't do. ~Zachary Scott