JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Paying to co-write with a 'hitmaker'

There is too much supply and not enough demand. I see ads all the time for people looking for something specific, no fees or strings attached (beyond usually the publishing share which is reasonable if they are supplying a specific use to anyone chosen). But for each opportunity I see there are 10's of thousands of potential artists/writers to fill it.

That said, it's like any job market, if company X isn't in need of workers, they aren't going to give you an interview. They might accept an application (just like taking a demo) and like most of those cases, they get a glance at best on their way into the trash can. It's a "we'll contact you if we're interested" at best and that rarely happens. It's very similar to the job market now in that there's a lot of people looking for the good jobs and not many to go around. But in the case of music, it's 1000's of times less likely they'll need something from you. Most decision makers already have a large backlog of A+ material they haven't found a use for but come from people they personally have motivation to help. The bar is often far higher than people really understand. I know from our own awards process that truly outstanding music simply gets lost in the vast ocean of available music. We have some large genres where we could go 200-500 songs deep for nominations and not drop in quality yet we only have 20 slots. Remember we had 560K songs and in the end only 80 of them one an award. Do the math on that. And that only accounts for music from our 50K members. There may be 1 million people pursuing some level of opportunities for their music in the western countries alone.

If you don't like the marketplace and how they operate/make decisions, what you do is you FIX it by going into the business you're unhappy with yourself, doing it better and if your "theory" is right, making a fortune. But the truth is most of the time, their system IS right and your theory is wrong. Why is it THEIR job to do anything FOR you? That of course is the mindset of socialism or communism where everyone is treated the same, (sort of like the insipid practice in much of the USA to give out the same trophy to everyone who plays, rather than just to the champions in kids sports) but of course when it is put into practice, everyone does get treated mostly the same, BADLY. The "Free" market means if you have a better idea, stop whining and do it better. That's what I did with JPF. EXACTLY in fact. OF course to fix what I thought was broken about organizations, I had to give up a lot, like my own music pursuits. I have had little regret, though now and then I will pull out an old song and think.. wow.. with all I know and all my contacts, wouldn't it be nice to make some music again? Not to make money but more for the fun and passion of getting thoughts and emotions out in musical form. That's what it should be about anyway. Once you go past that and expect business (not art, BUSINESS) to do it YOUR way disappoint is usually going to follow.

Brian