SongShop is a website built to help independent songwriters advertise their song catalog and pitch to artists from all over the world. We're talking to the founder, Steve Gerein! It's also a place where independent artists & bands can go to find original songs to record as their own. SongShop gives artists an entire library of songs to search through and record because SongShop says that finding the time and having the proper network connections to get these songs pitched can be an uphill battle.
Today's episode covers:
SONGWRITERS:
ARTISTS & BANDS:
LICENSING & MUSIC BUSINESS:
DOWNLOAD MY NEW FREE GUIDE: 5 Steps to Monetize Your Passion
SongShop's Website
SongShop's Instagram
Funktastic Chats website
SongShop is a website built to help independent songwriters advertise their song catalog and pitch to artists from all over the world. We're talking to the founder, Steve Gerein! It's also a place where independent artists & bands can go to find original songs to record as their own. SongShop gives artists an entire library of songs to search through and record because SongShop says that finding the time and having the proper network connections to get these songs pitched can be an uphill battle.
Today's episode covers:
SONGWRITERS:
ARTISTS & BANDS:
LICENSING & MUSIC BUSINESS:
DOWNLOAD MY NEW FREE GUIDE: 5 Steps to Monetize Your Passion
SongShop's Website
SongShop's Instagram
Funktastic Chats website
Musicians, listen up. We're talking to founders. Steve Gerein about how he's paving a new revenue stream model for artists and songwriters worldwide a platform for artists and writers to work together without taking a cut of anyone's royalties the song shop advertises their library to artists all over the world getting writers in front of new artists and getting artists in front of new writers Coming up on Funktastic Chats.
Steve:I wanted there to be some sort of upfront payment for the songwriters, so they can actually make some money from what they're doing I've had people on Facebook messenger and stuff, and be like, I have been looking for a platform like this for 15 years the site automatically generates a contract between the licensor and the licensee. It automatically delivers the licenser. Your song file your demo file, the lyric sheet and the core chart. And you get a chunk of that licensing fee deposited directly into your PayPal account. Song shop gives independent writers the opportunity to get their songs in front of artists from all over the world without giving up any of your royalties. It also gives artists and bands and entire library of songs to search through. And they remove that barrier and create a community we're independent artists and writers can work together to help build each other's careers. Welcome to Funktastic Chats. I'm your host, Mike Zabrin. Hey, did you know, I have a free guide for entrepreneurs, five steps to monetize your passion. Go to www dot Funktastic Chats dot com or click the link in the show notes of this episode. This is actionable content, a roadmap of things that every entrepreneur must do to turn your passion into a full-time career.
Mike:Song shop is a website built to help independent songwriters advertise their song, catalog and pitch to artists from all over the world. It's also a place. The independent artists can go to find original songs to record as their own songs. Shop gives artists an entire library of songs to search through and record because song shop says that finding the time and having the proper network connections to get these songs pitched can be an uphill battle. They remove that barrier and create a community where independent artists and writers can work together to help build each other's careers. So with that, we're talking to the founder, Steve, Gary, and hasty, welcome to the podcast.
Steve:Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me. I'm super pumped to be here.
Mike:So Mike, you say getting a song pitch, let's talk about that because is pitched strictly between bands and artists, because I saw on your website that you're also connecting artists to be pitched for think placements for super bowl ads, the Olympics who are we pitching to on, on the sock shop?
Steve:I guess it's developed into a bunch of different things over the last few months. I've had some connections with people who deal with sync licensing, and they've allowed me to post pitches for sync placement as well through the site. You can pitch songs to artists who would be looking for songs to record, and you can also pitch to sync placements as they come up.
Mike:That's so cool. So let's start at the beginning of song shop. So let's say I'm a singer songwriter. Walk me through the process from the moment I go to your website about finding a band to record my song and collect royalties from.
Steve:Yeah, so I guess I will come at this with two different audiences, two different people, because it's two different audiences. First we'll start. With songwriters. So if you are a songwriter and you write a bunch of songs, you would love for artists to record your songs. You go to the site, you'd click on the membership tab, and then you have a couple of different options. You can sign up for our forever free membership, which gives you a five song catalog, but it doesn't give you access to the pitch platform where you can pitch songs directly to artists. For what it will do is it will get your songs. In the library and it will be advertised and promoted with the rest of the catalog to artists and in sync people all around. If you choose a paid membership, you get a larger song catalog, you get access to the pitch platform to pitch directly to artists and your songs are actually placed higher in the search. So paid members songs rank higher when artists search for songs. So that's another perk to having a paid membership. And then as far as the rest goes, once you have your songs on the site, if you're not going to actively watch for new pitches that are coming up, it's assess a set it and forget it, type workflow. We deal with promoting the catalog. We run ads and we are in contact with labels and artists and things like that who are looking through the catalog for songs to record. And the site takes care of the rest for you. If somebody wants to record your song, they purchase a license to record it. The site automatically generates a contract between the licensor and the licensee. It automatically delivers the licenser. Your song file your demo file, the lyric sheet and the core chart. And you just get a chunk of that licensing fee deposited directly into your PayPal account. The second type of user, if you are an artist, this is where the e-commerce style comes into play kind of the way the site's set up. So if you're looking for a song to record and you can just honestly go to the, find a song page on the site, punch up whatever your filters, you want it to be say, you want a rock song, that's up temple for a male singer. Click the search button. It'll narrow the songs by that. And you just go through and you can play them to see if you like them. And it's literally as easy as clicking, add to cart and checking out to purchase a license in the site. So it delivers everything that you need to get into the studio with it. The other way is you can go to the pitch platform. You need an account to create a pitch. So you would just go register and you create a song pitch. So say you're. So you're looking for two pop songs. You would just say that in your description, you set your song limit to two and you just post it on the job board and writers will pitch you songs for what
Mike:You even help with the artists learn the songs, don't you? Do you provide the songwriter provides core charts even for the artist? Is Is that true?
Steve:So that's up to the discretion of the songwriter, but yes, lots of them will provide a chord chart. For the song, the lyrics sheet is mandatory, but chord charts are not. So sometimes you'll get them. Sometimes you won't.
Mike:And you've got this whole website built out and you've got this amazing pitch platform as you call it where you could type in the title or the genre or or the gender, and it will give you access to songwriters demos. All the way across the world and artists are legally able to cover it and record their interpretation of the music. And I've read that you're a web designer. Did you build this whole song shop website by yourself?
Steve:I wish I could say I did, but no, I had an entire team. I hired a team to build this for me. It's definitely outside my field of an ability, of web design. I've done parts of it on lots of aesthetic stuff in Nevada, things as we've gone, but the meat and potatoes of the site was built by developers.
Mike:I saw you're also helping artists are at least a couple artists I saw on your Facebook community, which I'll talk about in a minute, but you're also helping artists make their own musician websites on some level aren't you.
Steve:Yes. I also do business mentorship and coaching for artists, which includes everything right from a website, all the way to building a marketing plan.
Mike:Wow. Yeah. One of the guests we had on the podcast is a friend of ours banned Google during Canada too. I know you're in Canada. But opposite end, right opposite into Canada.
Steve:Other side I'm by the mountains.
Mike:Oh, okay. Okay. So Ben Smith was based in Montreal but their website platform for musicians founded in 2003, and we were talking about ways musicians monetize their websites and how building musician websites require so much more thought now to capitalize on different streams of income that are just neat today. Do you plan on helping artists make money through building these websites
Steve:absolutely. On the website front, there's just so many different ways you can monetize things online. And you need to be able to these days, seeing as we all know, musicians don't really get paid for making music anymore. So, so we have to find new ways to make money. And lots of those avenues can be found online through. Having a really solid website, selling merchandise having membership sites, right where your fans pay a membership fee per month, and maybe they get a live hangout with you, or maybe they get, you know, a free show. They get discounted tickets when you're in town. That sort of thing. When we get back to playing live, that is
Mike:You're a musician too, aren't you? I think I read in a blog post, what your band made like $50,000 from a song or was it a song or an album or something where you had no idea about, because you didn't have this kind of platform available to you.
Steve:Yeah. So that's an interesting story. So I've been in the music scene professionally for about a decade. I got my start in the country scene up here, up in Canada and we had some band drama starting out as I'm sure most bands do. And we eventually ended up with the three, three of us original members and a couple other guys that we picked up along the way. And we ended up teaming up with a really awesome producer. I'll record a great album. At least I think it's a great, as I shared it's mine. And we released some tracks to radio, ended up going on a tour. The country played, shows all across the country and we had some really good success as independent artists. Anyhow, and yeah, that was the whole thing about the royalties. That's probably one of my blogs. You wrote, we had a little over 50 K sitting with sound exchange from satellite radio. Just hanging out and our radio tractor actually emailed us and he's like, Hey, have you guys signed up with sound exchange? I hear they're paying some pretty good royalties and we didn't even know what it was. And so, you know, we figured it might be a couple of hundred bucks and now this is significantly more.
Mike:Did you guys ever record a song that you didn't write that you guys ever record a cover song?
Steve:We never did we went to go do our second album and. This was just before COVID hit. And we were talking about a book, getting some outside cuts and stuff, and we live in, like I was born and raised in a small town, in a small town around here is like a thousand people, not 30,000 like people in other places may think. So there's not a huge community in the area. There's, you know, our biggest city is a couple hundred thousand folks. And so as far as having a ton of songwriters to connect with and a huge catalog of songs from publishers and stuff, that wasn't really a thing. So, so I took to the internet to find a place like song shop and it didn't exist. And so in my travels, I had ran into a bunch of people who were really interested in like, Hey, if you find a place like this, I'm looking for something. So you let me know. And it seemed like everybody that I talked to said the same thing, and I was like, you know what? I really have a passion for business and for marketing. And I've always been one of the main business people in our band, me and another guy took care of most of it. And so I was just decided to go all in and build this thing.
Mike:I love that I was the same way as even like a 14 year old kid with my first band and was like junior high school or something. I was the kid emailing all these professional booking agents like, Hey, can you can you have us play at your club? Like we, we play at this festival, you know, and I had loved it. But I wonder how sock shop has evolved since COVID have you seen an increase in. The demos being uploaded from songwriters because of more free time, they have.
Steve:It's actually only launched during COVID. I've only had the site up for a boat six months now it's been live. So it's still a very new concept. It's unlike any it's very untraditional, in the way of pitching and licensing songs goes, it's very DIY you do it yourself hands-on but by having it that way, it's very accessible to artists everywhere to songwriters everywhere. And the way that the business model is set up is that it allows writers to keep a hundred percent of their royalties, which most publishers and platforms like this don't do, you're going to lose that publishing and publishing percentage on that. Whereas we don't take any of that because we know I'm an independent songwriter and artist myself. So that's the last thing I wanted to do was start taking her old piece off the top of nothing.
Mike:Why should we be covering songs? I guess the obvious answer is you get more publicity if somebody covers your song, but you've got some other really great insight as to why artists should be doing this.
Steve:I really consider it covering songs lots of the time, because lots of these songwriters only write to have other artists cut their stuff especially in the pop scene, country music scene. Most of the artists don't write their own stuff. Lots of times they may have a credit. And that's only because the songwriters were willing to give up a percentage of the credit just to have that artist cut their song. Great. So lots of these genres, lots of the singles that you hear on the radio, the artists that it's singing didn't necessarily write that song and. There's a, quite a few different reasons that an artist might want to do that. Number one is maybe you're a fantastic singer and you're a great performer, but you just don't write great songs. Song writing is an art. It's a craft that takes years to develop. And if you're somebody who wants to get into the scene, maybe you don't write great songs and that's okay. Because you can find great songs to record and give yourself a leg up because especially in today's day and age with platforms like Spotify, having over 50 million songs on them, an average song, just isn't going to cut it anymore. You need to have a great song every time.
Mike:That's a good point. And to that, to the songwriters on your website, they don't have to upload. Load this studio quality ready to go mastered version. A lot of the times are these songwriters uploading more of a demo.
Steve:Yeah. That's what most of the files and most of the tracks, we have our demos, just because lots of these writers are, you know, they're writing and recording. Tons tens twenties, 30 songs a year. So by the time you, you add the production cost up, so you get commercial quality recordings for everything that just doesn't cut it. So, and that's the whole point, right? Cause you don't get to use the recording. You get to use the demo track, take that to the studio and record your own version of that song.
Mike:And I feel like you're adding a whole another revenue stream for musicians too. There are two types of licenses, right? There's a standard license and an exclusive license and the standard license you could have multiple artists cover that song multiple times and they collect income simultaneously through that song. Is that fair to say?
Steve:Yup. That's exactly how it works. So like you said, there's two types of licenses. A standard license allows. 10 artists to record that song at the same time. If it's so happens and then an exclusive license would give whatever artists would license that song a six month exclusive period to that track with the ability to renew it, once it runs out to keep it exclusive to them,
Mike:To decide that when they go on song shop and upload their track,
Steve:they do. You get to decide whether you want your songs to be available for exclusive or standard licensing.
Mike:I've used Harry Fox agency here in the U S I live in Chicago and I know about websites like this distro kid and CD baby. They allow you to acquire. Licensing to record cover songs, but you're adding a whole networking side between the songwriter and the artist, which typically doesn't happen.
Steve:Yeah. I have a Facebook group for everybody who's on the platform if they so choose to join. And then there's also the pitch platform, like you had mentioned before, where artists can post say, they're looking for five rock songs for an album and they have a fairly specific description of what they're looking for. They just put that in the pitch platform and songwriters can then go to the pitch platform and just like applying for a job. They just pitch songs to this artist who is looking for songs. It goes right to their email inbox. And so if they like it, they just come to the site, buy a license to record it. It's literally that easy. It's like shopping on Amazon except for a year buying song licenses.
Mike:I love that you can search by not only genre, but male or female too.
Steve:Yeah. And you can search by tempo. If you want mid uptempo ballad, you can search by moods. So you can really hone in on what you're looking for.
Mike:Wow. Because it launched so recently, what has been the feedback been on song shop? What have artists been saying?
Steve:It's actually been quite outstanding. I've had so many people, so very excited about it and are really happy that a place like this exists, I've had people literally phoned me on Facebook messenger and stuff, and be like, I have been looking for a platform like this for 15 years and just like crazy, awesome feedback. There's already about 400 members using the site 400 active users. The song catalogs up to over 200. So it's definitely growing at a steady pace and I've got lots of awesome partnerships coming up that I've been able to make to just keep growing it and bring more songs available to artists.
Mike:How long ago I know over during COVID, but like how many months ago did it launch?
Steve:I was beta testing in may, June been like a hug dish.
Mike:And you already have 400 users. That's 400 people that are like, this is so cool that I'm going to take the time to sign up for this
Steve:Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. Actually. It's cool. How it's just awesome, man. Especially like people like you that are just love it and are into promoting with me and having me on their stuff. It means so much because this was a huge brain child of mine that I just went with and I saw the need for it. I talked to a few people in the industry up here that. It had been around for a long time., my lawyer, actually the guy who I work with he was born and raised just like half an hour from where I'm from. And he's in a pretty successful rock band. They've toured the world too. And he's a drummer, but he's also an entertainment lawyer. He does. Uh, Do you ever see those skip the dishes commercials? Yeah, so like the, whatever not the scrawny guy, but the big guy. He's he does all the entertainment contracting for skip the dishes and for that actor. And so, yeah, he does it for all kinds of people. He's got a, he's been featured in blogs and like huge magazines all around the world. So when I brought this idea to him, he was totally on board for helping me develop the legal side of it. And he thought it was super, super awesome. A few people like that, that I talked to that were. Fairly well-traveled in the music industry. That thought it was a super great idea. I was like, I guess I'm going to go all in on this.
Mike:Yeah. And plus you never ever get to connect with the artist when you get a license for a song, like you rarely connect with a songwriter, you know? So just to have that connection there and be like, Oh my God, what did you think of it? It's gotta be soul inspiring
Steve:Yeah, because the people can see who recorded their stuff and who's who, when you license a song and you exchange emails, because those are in the licenses, so you can email back and forth. Yeah. Look each other up on social media. Like it's a, it's a networking thing too, right? Okay.
Mike:Yeah. Have you seen some crazy renditions of songs
Steve:No, there hasn't been that side. Hasn't been as busy as getting songwriters in. As far as the licensing and stuff goes, it's been a little bit slower, but I haven't been focusing on it as much, rather because I need to, I feel like I need to build a catalog before I can start bringing in people to find songs.
Mike:Yeah. Yeah. I bet. So a big market for people who write these songs and are performing, but also make it be so amazing to hear somebody else's rendition over it. I see it on Instagram all the time, you
Steve:Yeah, I right. That's another thing that's for, you're an artist that does write and record your own stuff. And you released an album five years ago. That's sitting there doing nothing for yourself now just upload your songs to the site and see if somebody fixed them up.
Mike:Do you feel that the site allows musicians to. Empower one another and help build each other's career because within 10 minutes of making my profile on som shop that's immediately, how I felt.
Steve:Lots of songwriters. I see in, there's nothing wrong with the way that the things are done, but I see writers that will just license their songs to artists for nothing. And they'll just let them use them. Especially like people that, that write More or less for a living, but I don't really understand why that needs to be that way. You put the effort in to write a song, to demo the song I understand you're getting royalties off the top. Once the artist releases that song, but with SongShop I wanted there to be some sort of upfront payment for the songwriters, so they can actually make some money from what they're doing. So that's kinda why I created the whole licensing thing.
Mike:Correct me if I'm wrong because you're the expert here but by copyright law, I think they call it compulsory licensing, where you can cover most, any song without. Directly contact them. The, you just need the proper licensing and they can't relate to year interpretation of it. But this is a time where we really need networking between musicians now, more than ever in the world,
Steve:Yeah, I would totally agree. It's a networking has become, you know, it's a time where it's really necessary and it's also a time where it's become incredibly easy because of the worldwide web, right? Like I'm been able, I'm able to be in contact with people that I would have. Never ever had the chance to meet in my life just because I saw somebody post something in a group online and I'm just like, Oh, I'll reach out to that person and see how things go. And then, you know, it turns into a partnership or it turns into a podcast interview. You never really know
Mike:I love that you said that because honestly, I started my own podcast very recently and it was for selfish reasons. At first I wanted to grow as an entrepreneur. On my own and connect to people that I exactly, like you said, that I typically wouldn't normally connect with. Talk to me about the learning, the legal aspects of the music industry you learned through building this website. I assume you had your fair share of attorneys making this website. Yeah. the knowledge of publishing rights grow the more that you dug in to making song shop a reality that you already have a big background of that? Tell me about the learning process on your end.
Steve:Coming up through the country scene up here, I was that guy for our band. I was the, the royalties and like all that business, intricate stuff. I took care of all that for us. So I had an idea, but once I got into actually understanding the way everything works and where all the different. Royalties come from and how they're paid and who's entitled to what it was. It was a really big learning experience. I definitely had a fairly extensive legal bill from the lawyers to get this thing up and going, but I needed to make sure that everything was super tight. Everything was put together very well and that we could actually generate an automatic license between two people online. Without it, having a bunch of holes in it. The whole learning thing and understanding the way all that worked was it was definitely a learning curve. That's for sure.
Mike:You know, all of the business owners that we've, had on here who have either left their corporate or executive job to, to do this startup. They all do it because. At first it's the the love of it and the passion of it and that overtakes the expenses of it because they see this as they see this growing and being extremely profitable within years to come, where do you see stop shop within the next year or so?
Steve:You know, that's a really hard question to answer because I've actually just made a couple of really cool partnerships with some people who deal with lots of ANR stuff for artists, and also have a fairly large catalog of songs from songwriters. And so we're working out some sort of deal to get all that up on the site now. And I also have. Just been talking with somebody over in the UK, actually, that's going to help me do some business development and have some really good contacts over there. And so there is some potential for this thing to absolutely blow up within the next six to eight months, but it's also a brand new platform and a brand new way of doing things. And so it also might take some time to catch on and for people to realize, Hey, I can make some money doing this, or this is a really good thing for me to use. Oh, I don't have to focus on songwriting all the time because I can just go grab a song if I need to do a quick single release, because you know, as we know to stay on top, you have to be releasing singles all the time. That's the way that things go.
Mike:Yeah, every month you say every month, come out with a new single, I think you said.
Steve:To stay relevant, especially if you're going after streaming they say at least every couple months, some people say once a month, I don't know even how financially feasible that is for lots of people. But if you need to be releasing music that often, I don't know about you, but every time I write a song, I can tell you it's not a great one. And so by the time you find a great song that you've written, you know, maybe you have to write 10, 15, 20 songs while you're working your day job. And while you're dealing with your marketing and while you're practicing with your band and doing the graphic design and the videography and all these other things. And so having places like song shop, you can just go and find a song to release and it takes. All the pressure of having to write a great song off of you. You send the demo to your producer, they get the song prep for you. You just go lay down your vocals and it's done.
Mike:Let's dig into the actual licensing process just for a minute. Cause I know if you're covering a song the royalty rate, I think it's 9.10 cents per album sold and per download sold. And I know sometimes you have to prepay royalties. So if you're going to sell up. A thousand downloads, you need to pay 9.10 cents times a thousand upfront. How does this all factor into purchasing the licensing through song shop compared to some of those other platforms where that's the process
Steve:yes. So our mechanical rate is actually 10 cents, 10 cents per song on a standard license. And if it's an exclusive license, it actually doubles to 20 cents per copy, just because there's not the chance of you licensing it to anyone else. And so it's just another perk for a songwriter to have an exclusive license on their song. Just exactly. As you said, it's per physical or digital sale. The royalties are to be paid from the artist every six months after downloading. And it's got to include a statement of earnings and stuff like that. And it's all just set up via PayPal for that. But there is no, there's no upfront payments for anything like that. But like you said, if there's going to be a thousand albums printed, or once those albums are printed, the artists would have to pay that 10 cents or 20 cents per copy.
Mike:How does the work for for streaming? Is that a different type of license for Spotify or iTunes?
Steve:streaming it's not necessarily a mechanical royalty, but it is included in the license. And streaming is an interesting one because as we all know, unless you're getting hundreds of thousands of streams, you're not really making any money. There is streaming royalties built in. And I guess one thing I should mention while we're going through this is that it also comes with a video usage license, which is another reason why it's a paid license for the artist. Because most times you might need to get a sync license to be able to use it in a music video. But this license also includes live performances online, so streaming plus you're also allowed to use it for music, video usage. And that's another thing where if you have it on YouTube, so your music video start to making a much money off ads and stuff. Once you exceed $2,000 monetization that 10% fee kicks in to be paid to. The writer for royalties
Mike:Wow. And that's all through the license on unsung shop.
Steve:that is all through the license. That's all built into there. Yeah,
Mike:so I went to music school at four years of music school, and I learned a lot just by reading your blog and looking on song, shop and reading about you. Do you think there's not enough awareness or education? For artists out there when it comes to royalties and where to find them.
Steve:I find that's a huge gap with the music business in general is there's lots of very misleading information as to royalties and even just general music business. I was once told when I was coming up. If you're going to be in the music business, it's 80% business and 20% music. And from what I've experienced, I'd like to change that to more of a 90% business and 10% music thing, especially with the way things go today, because there's so many avenues and so many different hats and artists has to wear, especially if you're an indie artist going on by yourself without much of a team there's just so much to know. And there's, like I said, lots of misinformation out there. And so that's a huge thing that I try to accomplish with my blog has just through, through what I've learned through trial essentially. And through some really great mentors is just try to share as much information as I can.
Mike:Let's talk about some of those platforms. One part of the publishing rights is, and this is a big one. The writer share. Could you talk about. Your experience with writers share whether through your old band how you've seen artists use it, their BMI and things like that.
Steve:Your song is essentially two parts. There's the recording. And then there's the composition of the song. And the composition of the song is then further broken into two parts. One part of the composition is the song writer share. And once part of it is the publisher share. And so to collect the songwriter, share of those publishing royalties, You need to be signed up with a performance rights organization. In Canada, the only one we have is so Ken in the United States, there is BMI as cap and C SAC, I believe. And might even be a couple more. You got to have a few more than we do, but you essentially just sign up for these programs, for these platforms. And when your song is played on radio stations and stuff like that's where the royalty is generated.
Mike:Do you feel that artists are led astray when they don't take care of the business upfront. Do you think that's detrimental to the artists when they don't take care of things like the writer share in the studio right then and there and they wait and wait until the song was making a bunch of money and figure this stuff out. What is the typical, business the mindset you should be in when you're in the studio recording, what are the things that artists need to have.
Steve:Even before you end up at the recording, the song stage, you need to really have your stuff ironed out and ready to go. Cause I've heard of artists getting into the studio and the producer deciding. Part way through recording that they are getting, you know, 10% of the songwriting royalties, or they're going to take 50% of this or that. And that should be ironed out well before anybody ever hits record. Unless that sort of thing is coming up in the middle of a recording session, it might be a really good idea to just stop and walk away and have a conversation with whoever is bringing that up because. That's the kind of thing where people can get hosed into some pretty shady deals. Especially if it's a producer, that's been working with a bunch of different people and all of a sudden they know what this song is, did it get big? And they started doing stuff like that. So, so especially if you're like writing splits and stuff, when you're doing, co-writes really make sure you have that ironed out. As soon as you sit down to write, this is going to be like, you know, even if you bring in. 65% completed song. Is that song going to be split 50 50 with both the corridors? Is it going up? Is there three of you? Is everybody getting a third? Like just have the conversation up front. It'll be way easier for everybody at the end of the day.
Mike:Do you have any advice for upcoming entrepreneurs who have their own business idea? As far as scaling the business globally? What you're taking on?
Steve:Connections and networking it's and you don't need to do everything yourself. My God, that's something that I'm still struggling with. I tend to have this bullheaded ego that likes to think that I can do everything myself. And what happens is I just ended up getting burnt out. Connections are huge. I'm finding that the more people I talk to, like just like yourself, who have got their own audience to, to talk with people who believe in what you're doing and share it with their people. I find that's almost more, that's much more valuable than running a Facebook ads campaign. And I've ran Facebook ad campaigns for quite some time. They're helpful, you know, when you know how to market online property. But really making connections with people I'm finding is going to be the biggest and fastest way to get this out to the right people. So just, don't be afraid to reach out and say hi to somebody because you never know, they might ask you to be on their podcast, or they might ask you to be a businessman or, you know, mentor you business wise, or they might ask to put their catalog of songs on your website. You don't really ever know. And it all just starts with a simple Facebook messages. A lot of the time.
Mike:Are there certain tasks that you're now able to outsource as a business owner that you weren't able to in the beginning was all you mentioned you were getting burnt out.
Steve:Yeah. I still do everything myself. I will hire people here and there when needed, but I took a lot of time in learning lots of different skills while this was being developed in the first place. When I had web developers working with me, I read a lot of books. I took a lot of courses, learned a lot about web design and marketing. So I was able to do it myself because, you know, I'm also a musician. I work a day job. I don't have no tens of thousands of dollars a month to throw around at marketing and hiring people. So I wanted to be able to be fairly self-sufficient and it is definitely going to get to a point. Or I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and hire people to do things for me, but yeah. To get started it's been a big asset to be able to do things myself. That's for sure.
Mike:Song shop is a website built to help independent songwriters advertise their song, catalog and pitch to artists from all over the world. And it's also placed the independent artists can go to find original songs to record as their own. So Steve, before we go, where can people find more about song shop and sign up with the profile?
Steve:First of all, they can go to the website is www.song, shop.ca. I am also on Facebook. I have a really awesome Facebook group that I try to offer a bunch of free stuff. We do songwriting challenges give away free demos and stuff like that in the Facebook group. And that group is called song shop community. So you can search for that on Facebook and it's at song shop.ca on Instagram.
Mike:I love the Facebook group too, because I love hearing about all of the success stories and I'm sure more are going to be coming from users, right? Because that community is mostly users. Isn't it?
Steve:Yes, it is. It's a good part. Good chunk. Most of them are users, I would believe, but I know that people just joined the group that aren't users too. So they like getting the value out of it. And yeah the biggest success story we have so far is one of the users licensed the song within 48 hours of creating a profile. So that was pretty awesome.
Mike:Wow. That's awesome. I bet if they licensed that more than once, that could really turn into a profitable revenue stream
Steve:Yeah, absolutely. And as soon as, like I said, as soon as the word gets out, that this is a service to people, this, I really think that it can be a massive thing for songwriters, huge value, because you can make money off of your song and you can actually license them and make a bit of money from your
Mike:Whether you're a songwriter or an artist it's very easy to make a profile and get set up and have Steve, thank you so much for joining us. Man. I can't wait to keep up with you and watch song, shop grow, and watch my own network grow too from using this right. And that was Steve Garen, founder of the song shop for more information about the song shop and to create a free profile visit www.song shop at that CA. This is a really great revenue stream model Start earning money on songs you wrote that have been on the back burner for years or you want to earn money right away from other artists, covering your songs and connect with other artists from all over the world. I very recently released a free guide for entrepreneurs. Five steps to monetize your passion, go to www dot Funktastic Chats dot com or click on the show notes of this episode. This is actionable content, a roadmap for entrepreneurs to turn your passion into your full-time career. Thank you so much for joining us. You are extraordinary. We'll see you next week.