JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Songwriter Message Forum Songtown USA

Jane,

Usually if you need to ask if they are worth it, your instincts are already warning you. Go with your gut. Always remember this rule:

Rule: You cannot buy success of any kind. Why? You don't have enough money. Record labels CAN buy limited success. They do it all the time. But they can't buy LASTING success. A mere human can't buy any real success. So if you pay a company with ANY thoughts that they are going to get you closer to success, you're incorrect. If it worked, they would have the Record Labels as clients, rather than you. The hard truth is that no one can make you successful, only YOU can and sure, you will need a lot of help, but people who can help you work for a % of your success, not an upfront fee.

There are plenty of friendly people here who can and will be happy to help you advance your knowledge and writing. FOR FREE. Sure, we may suggest a book to read to learn many of the basics (I am happy to suggest a few). Many of the best Songwriting educators have participated with JPF as Mentors and many have come here and posted and helped people for free over the years. (A couple sadly have passed away, but many are still out there).

Look for books (often you can even find them in a library or a used book store) written by John Braheny, Jason Blume, Pete and Pat Lubbock, Diane Rapapport, Steve Seskin, Harriet Schock and I can offer more if you like and read anything you can find here or elsewhere by board regular Marc-Alan Barnette (MAB as he is known) as he's been there and done that and offers great advice here all the time. Additionally, there are dozens of others here who offer up excellent advice regularly including Gary above. I'll let you decide if you find my offerings helpful. One of my heroes here is John Lawrence Schick who you should pay close attention to if he offers up advice. He's getting more placements with major TV shows than 99.9% of others out there. I would keep dropping names but then I will leave good people out so I will stop here, but there's plenty more on or associated with JPF and all will help you without a charge. You just need to ask good questions and now and then it helps a lot of you actually take the advice. Often people come to get affirmation that they are doing it all right and ignore anything suggestions to the contrary. If advice comes without a fee, you'd always be well served to give it some serious thought. People offering tangible advice (meaning advice that not only offers criticism, but also possible solutions to go along with it) because among all levels of creators, it is ALWAYS easier to give quality advice on someone else's songs than it is to see the same weakness in your own. So one of the best learning tools you can get is to simply critique other people's work and offer up your thoughts on how to improve it. THEN you need to be smart enough to listen to your own advice to others to fix your own work. Often you have the answers in your head, but connecting those answers to your own work is difficult and only comes through repetition and hard work.

Stick around, you might learn something. At least that's my opinion, I could be right. -Brian Austin Whitney May 28th, 2019