Don’t look now, but across the country there are scores of universities offering programs in the music business. And many of these schools offer songwriting instruction as part of the deal.  In the face of a shrinking record industry, does this make any sense? I can almost hear the laughter from those who are in [...]

Song publishing was once a simple, straightforward process: Listen to the songs your songwriters have written. Demo the best of them. Pitch them to the appropriate producers and artists. Rejoice when one of the songs gets recorded. Rejoice again when the song is selected to be a single. Rejoice yet again as the song climbs [...]

Kosser on what makes a song a ‘classic.’

We all have a pile of songs that we’ve written over the years. Some are forgettable. Some are truly memorable and then some become indelible treasures, songs with a place in the American songbook, songs that decades after creation are still playing on the air, or on the internet somewhere in the world 24 hours [...]

A few months back, a great Nashville record executive announced he was leaving his job as head of the Nashville office of one of the world’s premier record companies. He was the essence of power in the industry. He had built many of the biggest star brands in country music. He could survive anything. And [...]

If you write enough hits in your life, sooner or later somebody will accuse you of plagiarism. Just an hour before I started writing this, I got a call from a friend of mine who has written some huge hits. Seems he’s been exchanging e-mails with some fool who claims that my friend and his [...]

Nashville is a co-writing town, which usually means that with every new superstar/songwriter who turns the music world on its ear, there comes at least one nonperforming songwriter. Clint Black had his Hayden Nicholas. Garth Brooks had his Kim Williams. Alan Jackson had his Jim McBride. Taylor Swift has her Liz Rose. When Swift found [...]

Cumberland University, MU135, Craft of Songwriting. Two young promising songwriters named Daley and Josh. Both have ambitions in the rock world and both understand the role of a great song in a singer’s career. Daley is a hard-nosed jock. He’s taking some basic music courses, but he has a rare gift for lyric—he can put [...]

The last issue of American Songwriter contained a very nice letter from Nicole Nikki Sullivan. Part of the letter dealt with the agonizing problem many songwriters face about the need to go where the music business is. I began writing about the business of songwriting nearly 35 years ago and, even then, I was constantly [...]

In Nashville, most successful songwriters have a fairly short run. One hit, one year, two years, five years. Occasionally, we get one whose career approaches the length of a real career or, more often, one who has a few years of success, then slips into oblivion, only to emerge again for another brief era of hit-making.

When I write this column, it’s a little too easy for me to slog my way back in time and talk about the way things used to be. Heck, the world is altogether too full of curmudgeons who constantly moan about how good things were then and how bad they are now. Of course, they [...]

There’s no way to hide from this. I’ve talked about it before and I’ll talk about it again. These days, non-performing songwriters have their work cut out for them if they’re going to survive as professionals. Having said that, I insist that there are real survivors, pros that year after year get enough cuts to [...]