My Songwriting Contest Experience

In my prior blogs, I shared with you 10 upcoming songwriting contests and the benefits of entering a songwriting competition. Now I'd like to share with you my own experience.

I will never forget the first time I entered one of my songs into a songwriting contest! I was at my very first music conference, the Babbie Mason Music Conference, a gospel music songwriting contest. This contest was my very first songwriting contest ever. Songwriting for me was, and is, at times, a very personal thing for me. I was hyper-sensitive about exposing my songs to people until recently. But nevertheless, I decided to shed my song-shy ways to enter this contest.


And the song I entered I just knew was a hit! I loved singing it. Me and the guys who worked on it, worked on this song for hours, days, months even. I wanted it to be perfect! We believed our sweat and tears made the song a hit. I just knew EVERYBODY who heard this song was going to love it. I was confident that this song was going to place at the very least in the top 10 songs out of 100. Being a type-A personality and an over-achiever, I placed high value on my scores and rankings. So imagine my shock when the top songs were announced and I didn't see my song anywhere on the list. Then when I got my song back, my song was returned with a score of 70 out of 100! Are you kidding me?! They basically said I failed!


I was crushed and hurt.

There were three judges who critiqued my song and each had something positive and negative to say about the song. Because I was hurt initially, I refused to listen to the critique. I didn't even want to finish going to the music conference! I didn't want to hear what ANY ONE of those judges had to say to me. They didn't know how much time, and money, and effort had gone into this song! So I started not to return to the conference at all. But listening instead to my instinct rather than my hurt feelings, I went back to the conference, humbled, and ready to listen and learn. Returning was the best decision I made as I learned some valuable songwriting tips, gained some resources now, and am a better songwriter because of it. That's one of the reasons why I encouraged you as I did in my prior blogs to participate in one of the 10 upcoming songwriting contests and gave you some benefits of participating in songwriting contests. I hope you will take my advice!

I want to help you avoid some of the embarrassment that I felt when I found out my song was not up to industry standards. So I'm going to be doing a series of blogs on how to critique your own song. So stay tuned!


Thedy B, Attorney/Songwriter
Hits A Million, LLC
myspace.com/hitsamillionllc
interviewed.blogspot.com - contains interviews of top producers, songwriters, & music execs
globalmusicbusiness.blogspot.com -helping you go global with your music
musicpanels.blogspot.com -missed a music conference, find some clips of it here
mobilemusicbusiness.blogspot.com -go mobile with your music, find ways to do mobile marketing
musiclabels.blogspot.com - find out information on new record labels recently launched
hitsamillion.ning.com - network with other producers, singers, songwriters, and beatmakers

Creative Ideas for Songs - Part 1

Where does a songwriter get his/her ideas for songs? Song ideas come from all sorts of things, people and even places. If you open up your mind, heart, and ear to hear, you will find music and song ideas from all over. In much the same way that a comedian can look at a situation and find humor in it, songwriters too can look at situations and can find ideas of things to write about. I wrote the sex song, Cops n Robbers, after listening to one such person talk about it openly. To see my new video about the song, watch it here! Then discuss if you'd like!

Thedy B, Attorney/Songwriter
Hits A Million, LLC
myspace.com/hitsamillionllc
hitsamillionmusic.com
hitsamillionllc.com
hitsamillion.ning.com