The music world has always interested me. Not just the songs, but the business of the music industry. It’s often thought of as being just two sides. You have the creative people and the business people. And they don’t often agree on anything.
But it’s obviously much more nuanced than that. You have a lot of people working in the industry doing all kinds of different things to make a song, and an artist, successful.
One person in the music industry that is interesting to me is the song promoter or the song pitcher. I think another name was a song plugger. Or I could be wrong on all three of those, but that’s what I can find.
Basically, you have song publishers. They often sign songwriters and give them a base salary that is just enough so the songwriter can write songs full-time. They often help the songwriter to find co-writers. They schedule song writing meetings or sessions for the songwriter. They also help to promote songs that the songwriter writers.
For this, the publisher often gets a percentage of any revenue that a song generates.
A lot of that situation interests me, but for this post I’m thinking particularly about how the songs are promoted. I believe in many cases there is at least one person on the publishing team that is going around promoting songs. They build contacts in the industry. With artists, with producers, with record label executives. And probably with other employees at various companies throughout the industry.
I remember reading Jimmy Bowen’s book and when he would be hired to lead record label he would bring with him his “song guy”. This person was in charge of finding good songs for Jimmy to pitch to the artists he was producing. In this sense, the song guy was the person that the song promoters would go to with new songs from songwriters.
As a song promoter, you can’t just promote every song. But you do likely need to listen to a lot of songs. You’re a level of filtering in what will make it to the producers and to the artists. The songwriter is probably the first filter. They write 100 songs a year and share maybe 50 with their song promoter. The promoter listens to those 50 and shares maybe 10 with producers. The producers listen to those 10 and share maybe one with an artist they’re producing.
With this type of math you can understand why Dolly Parton often says that she’s written 500+ songs in her life in order to get 5 hits.
Back To Blogging
So what does this have to do with blogging?
There is more to blogging than just writing posts. If you enjoy the writing part it can be beneficial to focus on that area and to look for help in the other areas. One of the important areas is the promotion.
In the songwriting industry, a songwriter is rarely the person that does the promoting. Maybe in their early days when nobody wants to work with them or sign them to a publishing deal.
But most songwriters find success when they’re able to focus on their craft and others are able to help. That’s the entire reason that publishing companies exist. The leaders at these companies understand that it’s nearly impossible to do it all. So they spread it out.
If you’ve been creating a lot of blog content and aren’t seeing the results you want, consider hiring someone to help with the promotion. Have them create the newsletters. Have them snippet the content for social media. Have them do the engagement on social media.
It’ll cost you money, but it can lead to much more attention on your content.