When you have a “name” behind you, you can submit anything, and they will go with it. It is simply not what they are looking for. I learned to study the music business early and quickly realized that rejection does not mean you are not good or your song is not good.
There is one thing that bothered me, and that is the statement, ‘We do not give feedback on songs submitted!” I can understand why and how that could lead down the wrong road. Hopefully, something good will come from this. I mean, the cost to submit two songs is $70, and I can blow that easy on two dinners and a couple of drinks. (Such as Taxi) But I quickly thought, so what if it is? I’d rather keep an open mind, take this chance and see. I must admit that my immediate reaction was the site and the contest is a smart way to have songs submitted to a company for licensing opportunities and earn money in the process.
Consider – would your favorite cool band be caught dead entering a generic corporate talent search like this one? Imagine for a minute a first-class group like the French Exit at Emergenza. In case you haven’t figured all this out by now, the winners here may actually be the best of what the judges had to work with. And in case cutting-edge lyrics are your thing, for a laugh, here are the winners in the Lyrics-Only category.
IS IT WORTH IT SONG CODE
Quartet’s Code Word at least shows some promise, even if it it’s not exactly edgy. Americana winner Kevin Meisel’s Cruising for Paradise is a third-rate Jimmy Buffett pop number with a little mandolin overdubbed to give it that down-home Americana flavor. The second-place winner in the World Music category wasn’t remotely exotic: Leni Stern’s 1,000 Stars is a vapid semi-acoustic pop song in the style of the grand prize winner. At least the third-place winner, Irish band Chrome Horse’s Reflections of a Madman shows some passion, even if the verse is a blatant ripoff of the Ventures’ Egyptian Reggae.Ī look through the rest of the winners didn’t turn up much of anything worthwhile either. The ersatz emotion recurs with the second-place winner, Quebecois emo-pop band Tailor Made Fable’s A Case of Mistaken Identity. In case you’re not familiar with the band, they achieved some recent notoriety by recording an earnest Green Day style cover of a Don Henley song. “Being grown up isn’t half as fun as growing up,” Roe asserts, a tautology for the comfortable upper middleclass children he envisions as a customer base. “The only thing that matters is following your heart, and eventually you’ll get it right,” Roe strains, affecting an intensity of emotion that his band’s third-rate Good Charlotte imitation reaches for halfheartedly before giving up. The song that won in the rock category, by Kristopher Roe of the Ataris was even worse, an even more cliched emo-pop song. Is this contest simply a lower-budget version of the Grammies, a major label circle jerk with zero acknowledgment of what the listening public might prefer? In other words, considering its association with the major labels, is the deck stacked against artists who don’t fit the cookie-cutter corporate mold? Perhaps far more telling is that the song’s writers, fortysomething pop singer Kate Miller-Heidke and her husband Keir Nuttall already had a gold album and a major label deal in Australia when they entered the contest. The production is laughably obsolete – the drum machine shuffle was over by 1996, something you would expect judges ostensibly the caliber of Messrs. The grand prize winner was a generic trip-hop song. What chance does a musician’s hard-earned $25 entry fee stand? A look at last year’s winners provides the answer – and the organizers’ decision to make this information public may turn out to be the marketing disaster that shuts them down for good. Ultimately, contests like these boil down to a glorified lottery. The promoters of the competition claim that the judges include Tom Waits, Kings of Leon, Loretta Lynn, Black Francis, McCoy Tyner and Toots Hibbert, but even if that’s true, and those luminaries voted en bloc, they’d still be outnumbered many times over by a crew of schlockmeisters from the soon-to-be-defunct major labels. The $25K grand prize for the International Songwriting Competition may or may not exist, the latter case which would vault it into the former category.
A ripoff differentiates itself from a scam by not being downright illegal. The International Songwriting Competition – Worth It or Not?