EZPowell Music

Yes, yes, and yes. Musicians need to practice and most love to perform, and live for being on stage. Also, anyone who has noticed you online, such as label executives, will want to see if you are a good performer. Performance is crucial to the process of selling music as putting on a good show sells CDs. This may be less true now with the advent of the Internet and digitals but it is undeniable that it is nearly always entertaining to watch musicians play live. Even if I don’t like the music or a specific band, I am still entertained watching a performance of any kind. And of course, live performances may persuade me to buy a CD, buy a tee shirt, check out a website, and so on, and so forth.

Performances are about selling tickets and everything else a band produces, including both CDs and merchandise.

If you don’t want to be a performer, or don’t feel you are skilled enough then you can always be a songwriter. In truth the most profitable acts are those who write their own songs and perform them as well. However, between songwriting and performing, songwriters make a lot more money than performers, unless of course the performers are rock stars. Unfortunately for most of us, celebrity status is only conferred by the general population on a very lucky few.

You have to perform but you can also be just a songwriter if you want.

Something tells me this works better with more than just simple major and minor chords, where you write a melody based on the notes within each chord. Obviously you might get a better melody from more complex chords such as in something like Pachelbel’s Canon, but I think it might sound a bit stilted with popular music and being largely limited to clean major and minor chords in simple major and natural minor scale progressions. In other words, it works with pop music but I don’t feel that it works as well as setting up a background piece and then just singing something to it, or just plink-plonking around on the piano until something useful emerges. As with many things, and in the words of Dianne Warren, I must try to remember not to waste my time with krap and to keep experimenting until I do hum and hit note combinations on a piano until I do hear something that actually does sound good Maybe because in this songwriting thing nothing is exact! And it’s definitely not a science even if it can be semi-quantified and semi-qualified scientifically.

Someone recently told me that when a songwriter dies that people can steal their songs. This is not so – especially if people who like the songwriter know the songs. Even with the least known of Indie musicians, now-a-days even they will have some dedicated fans. So let me set the record straight on that one: (1) copyrights in the United States (those registered with the Library of Congress), stand firm for 70 years after the composer’s death and (2) copyrights can be extended by descendants for another 35 years after the 70 years (and perhaps more I think). So you can still get sued and banged-up for copyright infringement whilst a composer’s works are still useful. Think about it really, it makes sense – trying to turn Mozart into pop songs is probably difficult to say the very least. Additionally, if you want to copy someone’s stuff and they are not actually famous then you’re probably wasting your time anyway because their stuff is probably not any good anyway and won’t make you a bean – except maybe a law suit and a prosecution for copyright infringement.