A whole new style of composing music and writing lyrics has arrived in the form of digital songwriting.
By using hi tech home studio equipment and software, you can now record your music and lyrics at the same time as you actually write your songs.
In the Sixties and Seventies, the most any young songwriter could have hoped for, would have been a 10/50/50 song deal with a music publisher – any music publisher. Whether or not the songs would have been published was another matter. At that time, the ratio of works accepted but not actually published, may have been less than eight in every hundred. In reality, most songs acquired by publishers were left on the shelf to gather dust. If any were eventually published, mainly because an artist had covered (recorded) his work, it would have made the average songwriter feel like he’d won a week in heaven – especially if they had printed his music. If you could go back in a time machine and reveal to mister Sixties songwriter/producer that today he could not only record, arrange and mix his own songs on a virtual home studio, he could also publish, release, distribute and, with the aid of midi, print off the sheet music (in several keys) all on the same day – he would probably have had a heart attack!
So what is this thing called digital music and why did it have such an impact on the music industry? Believe it or not digital was first introduced as a kind of “upgrade” to its older cousin ‘ analog. Actually, there are still some recording artists and producers today who prefer analog claiming there’s a quality or originality to it that cannot be “captured” or reproduced using digital. Recordings in the Sixties, for example, are famous for having a distinctive analog sound of their own. Perhaps so – but most today, I would argue, prefer digital, not just for recording, but also for the advantages in transmitting, distributing, storing, retrieving, and even reconfiguring electronically.
Dennis Sinnott is a music consultant in the entertainment industry. He was formerly Head Of Copyright at EMI Music in London and is now a leading music consultant in the entertainment industry. You can contact him today at: dennis@musicenquiries.com http://www.MusicEnquiries.com
