Mike,

I am not ASKING for submissions, I just offered some of the folks here the opportunity to do so. I don't beleive that ALL good songs are created here in Nashville. If someone's song is chosen, Yes it going on a project of an artist that no one has ever heard of. I'm not sure why I need to defend myself. I assure you my gesture was just to open an oppotunity to the fine folks here. You can ask any of them if I have asked for money in anyway. I haven't and I will not be asking for money if one of their songs is used.

The very worst thing that could happen to the writer is that they'll have a great demo that will not cost them a dime. If we can't land a deal for the Artists, they will want at least 1000 CD's so they would be required to pay royalties for each cut. I think today it's still 9.1 cents per CD. That's $91.00 and a free demo, and that's on the down side. If we get them a contract, all of our projects are master quality with the hope that the label will release it the way it is. The writers from this forum own the publishing on their songs, so they stand to earn publishing and writer royalties, plus hopefully a better chance of getting other songs cut.

The duo is from West Virginia, they have been preforming under the name Audio Outlaw, but that will be changing, I don't know what it will be, but Audio Outlaw has to go. They have a fairly large following in WV, they also have a growing following in NC around the Myrtle Beach area.

As I mentioned before, our producer will produce anyone, but he will only use his contacts to pitch maybe 4 or 5 artist a year. Those artist are signed to a "Finder Fee Agreement" it does not cost the artist anything extra but pays the producer a % of the artist's sign on bonus if he lands them a deal. Of the last 4 He had 1 artist signed to Lyric Street and 1 artist/songwriter signed with a publishing company, He had another duo and got them as far as Laura Stroud at SONY, but they broke up and couldn't get along, not even on stage. So the producer had to turn down not only SONY but Buddy Lee as well. Now he will not even think about pitching another duo that's involved in a personal relationship. We have another that Horipro is looking at and they have asked us for an appointment the 3rd week of August to introduce the writer and to hopefully work out a contract. There isn't to much money in it for us, but if signed they too will help secure a recording contract. This is how Andy Griggs got signed. We are also pitching him to SONY/ATV. The first one to offer gets him. We do not pay the cost involved in recording an artist, I wish that we could, but if signed, the master is bought by the label, so the artist gets their money back. Many artist have some form of financing. The ones that we record with out pitching, what can I say. We are a business but they will not get a better produced, engineered and quality project anywhere else. It's pretty impressive to have the AA list players playing on your stuff and It is one of the first things a label rep read when they are being pitched. You wouldn't believe how much more respect a project gets when the rep knows most of the players on it.

This, however, has nothing to do with the writers. They don't pay for anything except whatever they put into their demos to present them.

BM Bland