Tim,

Michelle has some good advice here. As someone who deals with this every single day professionally I think I can answer this pretty well.

I can give you a test.

Go anywhere that you can randomly listen to a LOT of songs.
Go to web sites, places like this with hundreds of demos and songs. Make sure they are not the songs that are on the radio.

Give yourself thirty minutes to one hour.

Listen to as many verses and choruses as you can in that hour.

Tell me what you think about demo quality.

The basic facts are that any one year there are around
250,000-1 million songs that get pitched around a town like Nashville. And most of those are from known quantities.
Mulitply the friends of friends, mail in services, demo studios, basic scam artists, etc. and you have 10 times that.

The Internet as one Billion songs a month on the internet with 30 million artists on You Tube, MySpace, and various web sites.

The library of Congress is backed up three years processing copyright forms.

What do you think?

We now have higher quality on our cell phones and I pods than most people had on those giant "state of the art" stereos most people grew up with or had in their cars.

So if you are a publisher, you listen to about 300 songs every three days. Those are songs in your catalogue, songs from your writers that you pay,songs from friends of friends, and just a ton of things. All to get about 20 or 30 spaces per week.

Artists are writing most of their own material now. Hit writer and artists Darius Rucker, a hit artist with Hootie and Blowfish ANd now a major country act, wrote 72 songs for his current CD. He is a tried artist and writer being number one in TWO catagories. How many of those 72 songs is he supposed to move out of the way to make room for unknown songs with no demos?

Record companies listen to around 3000 songs a week. They have artists they are trying to promote and all the time listening to songs from everywhere. But there is only so much time and they have tons of other things to do namely promote the artists they already have.

So now what do you think?

Without a quality demo, you have less than a chance of being struck by lightning in a tornado in a submarine underwater three thousand miles away from the actual lightning storm.
Now you can say "Well there's still a chance' like Jim Carrey in "Dumb and Dumber" but to be honest, no there isn't.

It is always about upping the level of your odds. You have them all stacked against you to begin with. Let me ask you these questions. If you can answer them yes, you don't need a great demo:

Are You a known quantity who has known an artist for years.
The majority of artists record their songs or those of their friends,their producers, or the people who sign the checks they recieve.

What would you do?

Do you have a track record of dozens of hit songs that bring in enough money.

Jeffery Steel, the top writer in Nashville has around 200 cuts, about 70 top tens, 14 number ones over a 10 year period.
Jeffery even has top notch demos on all of his songs.

Do you have that many hits?


I believe if you really think about this and answer it honestly, you will know the answer.

In the past three years I have been working with two groups of artists that are currently on top of the charts in country music. Steel Magnolia and Frankie Ballard. I produced Frankie's first CD and had Megan,the singer of Steel Magnolia in the studio continuously singing demos and on things that I had written with and for her.

Everything that was pitched on them were fully produced. A record company or publishing company, when they start working with artists, first ask "What else you got?" They want to hear everything. And demos represent the artist when they are not there.

The last thing I would say is that about a year ago I was on the bus of country superstar Eddie Montgomery of Montgomery Gentry's bus. Eddie started playing me songs that were being pitched to him ANd songs he had currently written for himself.Every song sounded like a radio hit.They were HUGE demos. The songs were AMAZING. And this is just to present to his OWN label for HIS upcoming projects.


So yes. It is ABSOULTELY ESSENTIAL to have great demos to even get things HEARD.

Hope this answers your question.

MAB