Ray,

Again, no one knows anything. If you have ever noticed the "Special 3 bonus tracks" on a greatest hits record, those are songs that were recorded but not released on another project.

For a project:

An artist in this day and age will write between 30-60 songs of his or her own.

They will also have between 20-50 songs that they have had for years from their own catalogues. Songs they loved growing up or had written in past years.

They will record demos on between 15-25 songs to see if the songs fit.

They will listen to between 25-300 songs of the major hit writers
friends, friends of friends, the producer's (who are usually writers) publishing companies or the one's they have written themselves.

They will have over 3000 songs submitted by people they know or have reputation. The actual artist or producer will only hear about 100 of these. The rest will be filtered out by underlings.

All songs be weeded down to about 30 possibles for the next project. Their own songs and those of major writers will recieve highest consideration.

Those will be heard by committees for the record companies and any one can be derailed at any time by variety of sources and a variety of reasons.

That will come down to 15-16 that are actually recorded.

12-14 of those will be chosen for the CD.

There will be between 10-12 acts on each label (5 major labels) doing the same thing.

There will be around 1500 songs released on major labels each year. Outside sources have a shot at 52 or less of those.

All music is done by committees. The committees simply get smaller the larger the status of the artist. At any one time there are about ten-fifteen artists that fuel the sales of the industry. Those acts can call more of their own shots. But they still can be vetoed.

Several years ago, Toby Keith was stopped from releasing his entire record by the president of his record company at the time. He formed his own label, bought back his record for one point five million dollars. Released it himself and had very good results with several hit singles. The artists that can pull up that kind of cash are very few and far between.

MAB