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Originally Posted by Marc Barnette

When you are trying to pitch songs to the music industry in Nashville, you go up directly against about 25 people who are not artists who get more than one cut a year. There are around 3500 songs released on major and large independent labels. BMI, ASCAP and SESAC only survey 200 songs a year for significant royalty streams.


This reminded me of something. Here is some info that if you read it right will let you know how really tough it is.

I did this to get an idea of how many writers get cuts or get more than one cut. There are probably about 60 albums on represented on the album list below. I can't recall my exact methodology. I think I took the last two album releases of all the artists who had chart hits in (I think) 2004 and 2005 and looked at the writers of the songs. If the artist writes-cowrote ALL the songs on the album I didn't count it.

I heard once that 400 writers were let go in Nashville. Don't know if that was over a day, week, month, or year. 400? Sheesh, how many are there left? How many get turned down? I also heard 20 years ago that Tree Publishing had 60,000 songs in their archives. That's more than one for everyone person in my hometown! So anyhow, I assembled the information below and offer it so each of us to let us know, YES! We can be the one who makes it!

There were 942 songs on these albums. Most all were co-written. Many of these writers were the artist or in their group/duo/band, or were the producer, or wrote directly with the artist.

323 different writers wrote the 942 songs.

17 writers wrote 10 or more album cuts.

2 writers had 20 or more cuts. One was Toby
Keith with 24 and Craig Wiseman had 20.

Scotty Emerick, Toby's co-writer, had 19.

John Rich had 16. John had a bunch on Gretchen Wilson alone.

166 writers had only one cut. Most of those were probably co-
writes with more established writers.

A lot of these albums didn't reach gold status, which means 500K in sales, but they were albums by artists with chart records.

Here's the top 40 names in my list. Notice one of the most successful is Smith. I don't know if that's one or more people named Smith. This survey ain't guaranteed to be perfectly right but I think it's indicative of reality.

If you want more info on the writer, look them up in BMI or ASCAP.

This list, again, is writers who had have album cuts on a 2003-2005 abum by an artist with a country chart hit single in 2004 or 2005 (or 2003 - 2005 or thereabouts).

* indicates artist

24 Keith *
20 Wiseman
19 Emerick
16 Rich
15 Smith
15 Anderson
13 Steele
12 Osborn *
12 Tomlinson *
11 Nichols
11 McGehee
10 Rutherford
10 Thrasher
10 Martin
10 Vassar *
10 Paisley *
10 James
9 Beavers
9 Wilson *
9 Dillon
9 ONeal *
9 Turner *
9 Urban *
9 Mobley
9 Allen
8 Robson
8 Ingram
8 Evans *
8 Shanks
8 Bentley *
8 Warren
8 Beathard
7 Morgan
7 Hill
7 Lindsey
7 Verges
6 Satcher
6 Shapiro
6 Sampson
6 Gorley



In terms of writers with Billboard chart records since 1975, a 30 year span, this is the top 50 of what I have:


97 Bob McDill
68 Don Schlitz
64 Tom Shapiro
57 Rory Bourke
49 Troy Seals
48 Roger Murrah
45 Vince Gill
43 Chris Waters
43 Paul Overstreet
43 Charlie Black
42 Dean Dillon
41 Wayland Holyfield
41 Dennis W Morgan
39 Don Cook
39 Clint Black
39 Bob DiPiero
39 Mike Reid
38 Rafe Van Hoy
38 Craig Wiseman
37 Walt Aldridge
37 Bill Rice
36 Mark D Sanders
36 Merle Haggard
35 Alan Jackson
35 Hank Williams Jr
35 Larry Gatlin
34 Paul Nelson
34 Rick Giles
33 Bob Morrison
33 Bucky Jones
33 Gary Burr
33 Rodney Crowell
32 Sonny Throckmorton
32 Even Stevens
31 Don Pfrimmer
30 Mutt Lange
29 Keith Stegall
29 David Bellamy
29 Dennis Linde
28 Paul Kennerley
28 Max D Barnes
28 Toby Keith
28 Kye Fleming
28 Billy Sherrill
28 Kostas
28 Eddie Rabbitt
28 Jeffrey Steele
27 Norro Wilson
27 Curly Putman
27 Dave Loggins
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