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!Two years ago, as Billy Bragg tells it, the founder of British social networking site Bebo came to him for advice about [...]

This week’s sponsor:

With not a whole lot of rumor or speculation, the fate of the American Idol Songwriter contest for 2008 was up in the air until this week, when officials reopened the contest site to the public.
By all accounts, this year’s contest is just like last year’s contest. Key points:

You have just under ten [...]

Earlier today, I asked if it was “fair” that many songwriting contests use interns to screen entries. It all comes down to what is promised in a contest’s terms and conditions.
Unfortunately, many songwriting contests use vague terminology in their terms and conditions that often allows them to screen entries any way they want. On one [...]

So far in this special series, I’ve written about some of the myths and realities of songwriting contests, the reasonableness of entry fees, and the real involvement of contest sponsors.
Today, I’m tacking one of the most subjective elements of any songwriting contest — the judging.
The fact that many songwriting contests are really song critique services [...]

It used to be that, to rip off musicians, you had to take out an ad in Rolling Stone and open up a post office box. At least then, a disgruntled contest entrant could sit outside the post office at wait for someone to come and collect the mail. Today, all it takes is a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

UPDATE - APRIL 27: Big, huge, fun American Idol liveblog + discussion happening on our new discussion boards.
Half of the songwriters I know are busy filing their taxes. The other half are working hard to get their entries into the American Idol Songwriter competition. The deadline for both is the same: tomorrow.
We’ve had a really [...]