Ott,
I think you read more of what I say but don't listen to a word more than anyone I have ever seen. It;s the ARTISTS and their inner circles, the people that pay their salaries, the way that society has developed with the Internet and the fact that everyone is doing the same thing that has made pitching songs obsolete, not that fact that you are doing good sounding demos, or using the pitch service, web site of the moment. The reality is that all of those are obsolete.
First of all, NO YOU DON'T SEND IN ANYTHING. You start by ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY GOING OUT AND MEETING ARTISTS and other writers. You try to get them to have coffee, a drink, a meal outside of their gigs. You get to know them and what they are doing. When you have done that, is when they go to your web site, read your lyrics, hear your demos. Not until.
One of the reasons I talk about things like Frank Brown and Smokey Mountain songwriters festivals, finding other ones around you, going to open mics, workshops, seminars, is to get around actual artists and meet them face to face. This weekend in Gatlinburg I was around dozens of artists. Most of them are also being taken around by hit writers who are grooming them for record deals. Those are now the A&R departments. Hit writers grooming their artists to move up the ladder USING THEIR SONGS in the process. None of those people are going to even think about listening to something from someone they don't know. Period. just not going to happen. The only time they go to web sites like Reverbnation, is when THEY have something on there.It is the personal involvement that motivate them.
I live in the real world, not the bubble world of the Internet. I am out among real people, real artists, real producers, real label people, actual people doing this, not faceless nobodys taking money from someone on the Internet. I deal with real artists, their egos, the things they want to do, and how they are doing it. I deal with the real numbers of sales, or non sales, the conversations in the board rooms. Watching the people that get out there and actually do this.
You can do anything you want to. But if you are only going to those same sources, winning a contest or two, that is fine well and good. But those are only going to go so far. It is great if you want a pat on the back or a nice piece of paper. Mentions on a web site. Those are all fine. But if you want to go to a different level, have songs actually performed, embraced, gotten in front of audiences, recorded by others, those methods, if they ever worked (which my contention is that they really never have) are done.
The day of pitching songs outside of a very insular world are done. There has never been one song ever, one artist that sits around in a concert and says " I was searching the Internet all day, and about the three thousanth song I heard that day jumped out at me..." That is simply unrealistic expectations.
I have been to Minneapolis/St. Paul. There is a very active music scene up there. It is where Prince came from. But it doesn't come to your living room.
For the nine or ten thousanth time I have said that I UNDERTSTAND WHEN PEOPLE ARE NOT PERFORMERS. I work with a majority of people who are not performers. I try to hook them up with performers. I get them around performers, their friends, their inner circles, and many of those people have songs being performed recorded on web sites, all over. Matt Casey and Wags, here won the NSAI song contest this year. Matt has dozens of people he writes with, does shows in Boston and in Nashville. AND HE DOESN'T PLAY OR SING A NOTE.
Julie Moriva is here from Green Bay next week. She has had a publishing deal with TAYLOR SWIFT'S publishing company and writes with, works on videos, and does things with artists with record deals, and major tours. AND SHE CAN'T SING HER WAY OUT OF A PAPER BAG. So I understand that.
But as a non-performer you have a bigger problem than that. You have no experience with audiences. You haven't gotten out there in front of an unfriendly crowd and have to come up with types of songs to win them over. You have no experience sitting face to face with publishers, song pluggers, record people who could not care less about you, shooting your song down after the intro. You haven't worked on finding subjects, grooves, or things that haven't been done to death or fought your way for attention up against hundreds of other songs being played in a row.
Non performers don't have that. They don't have the inner emotions and physcology that performers have. They haven't lived that life.They haven't gone through the ups and downs, so they are unable to recreate that. And that is what artists are interested in, someone that understands THEM. But even at that,they are not even going to think about listening to anything that is not presented to them personally and in the right way.
If you don't want to physically meet people face to face,if you don't like the act of getting out there and going to see other people perform, getting to know other people outside of an Internet site, that is up to you. But if you think you are going to "mail things in" and get a different result than all the other people who are mailing it in, you are going to have a long wait to find out the same thing.
Again, until you physically know people, you are SPAM email. Ask yourself, how much spam email do you open from people you don't know?
That's what the Internet is up against.
MAB