Nashville’s songwriters falling on hard times
NASHVILLE (AP) — The Tin Pan South Songwriters Festival next week is billed as a celebration of the men and women who craft the tunes we like to hum. But many Nashville songwriters aren’t in the mood for celebrating.
Radio consolidation, corporate mergers and music piracy have made it harder to earn a living, they say.
“We’ve lost more than half of America’s professional songwriters over the past decade,” said Bart Herbison, executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Association International. “The ones staying alive have really had to adapt.”
The association puts on the annual Tin Pan South festival, which runs Monday through Saturday and draws thousands of songwriters and fans.
“Most of the songwriters who are making a living are stretching out,” Herbison said. “They’re writing musical scores, producing and turning to television work. You can no longer depend on pitching songs, having two or three hits and making a living that way.”
The change has been painfully obvious in Nashville.
Unlike pop and R&B, which often rely on the genius of a brilliant producer, the soul of country music has traditionally been the lyrics and melodies of its songwriters. Country artists also rely heavily on outside songwriters for material.
On a recent night at the Bluebird Cafe, an important venue for the city’s songwriters, Jim Kimball picked a funky rhythm on his guitar as he sang a tune called “Cold Turkey.” Afterward, he and his wife, Christian songwriter Stephanie Lewis, said things are harder than they were even a few years ago.
“It feels like in the past the situations that could turn into opportunities were more plentiful,” said Kimball, who has lived here a dozen years. “This is a time when the business is shrinking.”
Kimball has been forced to adapt. He plays guitar in Reba McEntire’s band, writes songs for movies and television and performs.
“I don’t think the music industry is going down the tubes,” he said. “I see more artists relying on live performances because that is still the bread and butter for a lot of them.”
Herbison puts much of the blame on radio consolidation, which he says has made it tough to get airplay and the royalties that come with it. Nine years ago, he said, there were 5,400 country music stations, compared with 1,700 today. The stations’ music playlists have also been shrinking to make room for more commercials and talk shows, he said.
“Three people program 85 percent of all country stations in America,” Herbison said. “They sit in office towers and don’t know George Jones from George Clooney.”
Songwriter royalties from CD sales are about 8.5 cents per song; that’s usually split between the writer and the publisher. Often, the songwriters’ cut is even less because he has to share it with a co-writer.
The big money for most successful songwriters is from performance royalties, which are paid when a song is played on the radio.
“The biggest lick a writer can make is having a single that does good on radio,” said Fred Knobloch, who has written songs for Faith Hill, George Strait, Ray Charles and Trisha Yearwood. “You want singles, and you want them bad.”
But there are fewer big record labels to release and promote those singles. A series of mergers has left only five major music companies: Universal, Warner Bros. and EMI, plus Sony and BMG, which are planning to merge.
Many in the industry — writers, producers, musicians, publicists — have lost their jobs in the shuffle.
“I get at least a call a week, sometimes two, from people who had jobs in this business a year ago that are looking for work,” Knobloch said.
As an established writer, Knobloch is able to work as an independent songwriter. But many professional songwriters are employed by publishing companies. Knobloch started that way too. He said the publishing company he once worked for had more than 100 staff writers in 1993, a little more than 50 in 1997 and fewer than 30 today.
The problem, he said, is that sales are off the pace set during country’s commercial peak in the early and mid ’90s. Revenue from the sale of country music albums quadrupled between 1989 and 1995 to about $2 billion. But in recent years sales have flattened and the industry has had to adjust.
“We’re not seeing that secondary buy as much now,” Knobloch said. “If you go into a record store and your income is stretched or there is competing technology, you buy one CD and not two.”
As for music piracy, or downloading music for free from the Internet, everyone believes it’s a problem, but not the worst one. Ultimately, many predict, the technology will help songwriters and performers more than hurt them. The challenge now, they say, is for the record companies to catch up to changing technology and consumer demand.
“They’ve been using the same business models for 50 years,” said David Cook, president of Belmont University’s Copyright Society in the School of Music Business. “I think if they embrace different business models that are more consumer friendly, the songwriters will see more money.”
———
On the Net:
http://www.tinpansouth.com/