Songwriting Marketing and Promotion

This is an important topic for serious songwriters and requires constant work and evaluations. There are quite a few really good references (on-line and off).

Some key points here are knowledge about the music business, where to send your songs, staying professional, understanding royalties and copyrights and what music professionals look for in a demo.

If you are ready to start submitting demos, a very handy book with a lot of great song marketing information along with categorized and selective contact information is the

2004 Songwriter's Market: 1700 + Places to Market Your Songs (Songwriter's Market, 2004)

In addition to the traditional music publishers and record labels route, there are really quite a few online options available these days. If you have some high quality demos you can always download the recording streaming audio and put them up on multiple web sites for additional promotion and/or CD sales.

This site is Hosted By iPowerWeb.com. If you are putting up an independent songwriter or music site (which is a great idea), I would recommend this hosting service. Very economical and full service hosting. You can do 4 full service seperate domains for the cost of one account.

Here are the other songwriter links that I have found to be very helpful for marketing and promotion:

		TAXI is the leading independent A&R company helping unsigned bands, artists and songwriters get record deals, publishing deals and placement in films and TV shows.

Great Sites to promote your songs:		IUMA Artist Pages - Still there after MP3.coms free artist pages have come and gone!

If you've created a CD (independently that is), this is probably the best place to sell it (other than at your own shows, of course).		http://www.cdbaby.com

Songwriting Contests

Songwriting contests can be fun and give you an idea of how you stand (at least with the popular vote) relative to other songwriters. Of course, the John Lennon Songwriting Contest is probably the biggest one around.

Here's a good list of songwriting contests: http://www.musesmuse.com/contests.html