Archive for April 2007

American Idol Songwriting Contest Winners Being Notified This Weekend

Apr 27th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: General

Welcome to spinme.com, where we help working musicians make more money making music. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or our weekly newsletter. Thanks for visiting!At 4ish on the West Coast, fax machines are buzzing with contracts.
I’ve received confirmation from two reliable sources so far that [...]



American Idol Songwriting Contest Discussion Continues

Apr 27th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: General

Because the scope of the discussions are going way beyond just this competition, I’ve opened up a discussion form area for songwriters to connect with each other… Follow me this way to the official discussion thread!
UPDATE 917am — Thanks for letting me know that the board script is messed up. Fixing it now…
UPDATE 932am [...]



American Idol songwriting contest hopefuls enter a long weekend…

Apr 26th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: General

And the discussion keeps on going, with most folks looking at the estimated 1500:1 odds that they might be getting a phone call from American Idol’s A&R department on Friday morning.
When you think about it, those aren’t bad odds.
Because the voting begins on Wednesday, it’s reasonable to assume that the team will have selected their [...]



TryTunes.com back from hiatus, featuring American Idol Songwriter entries

Apr 26th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: General

About three years ago, we had a clever little podcast experiment called TryTunes that lasted about two weeks because I was too busy to keep it fed.
However, in the past few days, a number of songwriters have asked if we could host their American Idol songwriting contest entries so folks could hear them. (In many [...]



American Idol Songwriting Contest Discussion Continues…

Apr 26th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Fun, Songwriting and Television

Our discussion about your entries into American Idol’s songwriting contest rolls on. For newcomers, we’ve been splitting comments into new threads every 100 comments or so to keep our server from melting. Beyond that, there’s a lot of fun, positive discussion going on between some industry veterans and some newbie songwriters about everything from whether [...]



American Idol Songwriting Contest Raises Great Questions

Apr 25th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Fun, Songwriting and Television

The discussion among American Idol Songwriter entrants is still going strong. We have opened up a new thread just about every day to accommodate the comments without bogging down the server or creating huge page downloads. If you’re new to our site, welcome!
Later this week, I hope to pull together a list of links to [...]



More Music Marketing Courses at Colleges

Apr 24th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Classes

In addition to the gold-standard program at Vanderbilt and the budding concentration at the University of Georgia, App State’s starting to add music marketing instruction to its music performance curriculum. While Berklee’s obviously done this for years, and written a few of their own course texts along the way, it’s great to see other schools [...]



Legal Song Lyrics Coming to the Web

Apr 24th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Songwriting

It’s been covered in a few tech journals today, but the news that Gracenote will soon distribute song lyrics online is great news for songwriters and for working musicians alike.
Although the web seems like a perfect place for song lyrics, copyright and trade association rules about distributing sheet music has made it pretty hard to [...]



213 Area Code Calls from American Idol’s Songwriting Competition Judges?

Apr 24th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Songwriting

UPDATE - APRIL 27: Big, huge, fun American Idol liveblog + discussion happening on our new discussion boards.
It’s a really fun week here at spinme.com, because a lot of our clients and readers are waiting anxiously to hear whether they have been chosen as one of the Top 20 finalists in the American Idol Songwriter [...]



Tell us about your American Idol Songwriter contest entries…

Apr 23rd, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Television

Because I spend much of my time working with performers, it’s really great to see so many songwriters stopping by the site to comment about the American Idol Songwriter entry process.
Here’s a new thread for you to keep the discussion going about your entries, your other songs, and the run up to May’s unveiling of [...]