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The Dirty Business of Hit Songwriting
- jfengel 6y agoIt sounds like the problems that affect a lot of artists: "Do it for the exposure". In a lot of cases the exposure is negligible. If you act in somebody's indie flick, the odds of that flick being seen outside of a festival or two are very small. If you do corporate logo or web site for free, it's very unlikely that anybody will say "Hey, what a great logo/site, can I throw some money at them?" It's not impossible, just unlikely. In the case of Big Stars, there may be more actual exposure going on. It's impressive that an unknown Dolly Parton would stand her ground against Elvis' agent. A hit by Elvis would have genuinely gotten her some real exposure, at least within that narrow band of people who actually hire songwriters. Good on her for making it big anyway, but that must have been a hard choice. It's not much of a secret that publishers of all kinds are really mostly publicity machines, now more than ever since the means of production and distribution are more widely available. I used to hope that that would mean more money leaking down to the "long tail", but the tail is too long and the hump too big. Most of the money still goes to a few big stars. Sometimes those stars come from a breakout without a publisher, but even so they usually parlay their fame into conventional publishing after that. I hope the songwriters manage to push back a bit. I notice that the article says that they lack a union. Unions help actors a lot. The abuses inflicted on actors before Equity and SAG are horrifying. (I thought ASCAP would do that kind of thing, but apparently not.)