JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Songwriter Message Forum PAYING FOR CRITIQUES

Country may be viewed within the country market as the best exemplar of songwriting, and outside of the country market as a regional anomaly. That's kind of neither-here-nor-there in terms of the discussion. Country music is certainly a market, people buy it, and some people make money producing it.

I think it's fair to say (and to agree with Marc and others) that Country is one of the only genres where the writer sells to a publisher and the publisher pitches to an artist. It's the old way of doing business in most of the music biz ("You played your song for a publisher and he'd tell you whether Connie Francis would record it"), but (again to agree) most artists are doing the whole thing themselves.

Because they can. Because it's cheaper. Because it gives them more control. Because it's expected.

For many artists in the singer/songwriter field, or for small-bands-of-artistic-integrity, the fan base *expects* that the artist/band is writing their own work, sharing their own thoughts and emotions. It can feel like cheating when an artist sings someone else's words. Sure, you will find some who will be open to co-writing, or to covering a song, but you're swimming upstream.

Why are you writing? If you're writing for yourself, get out and sing your songs and see what the audience says. If you want to write for a market like Nashville, getting a pro critique, from someone who has seen thousands of songs and knows what is most likely to work, seems smart. At least until you develop your own internal gyroscope.

But know what is being critiqued. Someone above (I think Rand) said he was careful to find out what kind of song the writer was *trying* to write, and crit accordingly. But the NSAI crits are focused on marketability, not whether you have achieved an artistic triumph. And critiques that come from contests will often be slanted towards "storytelling" or "plainspoken" songs.

(I got two lyric critiques back from the Great American Song Contest recently, obviously from the same reviewer who had them side by side because he compared them. One song was a plain-spoken country lyric, with characters and a situation; the other song was more lyrical, in which I worked hard to create some poetic images and a sense of mystery. The first song made the top five in the Lyric category -- the other one was given low marks for "clarity"

A pro critique, IMHO, can be helpful to get a better sense of whether someone in the business would be interested in the song.