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I love listening to new stuff as much as I can because it does remind me how high the bar is set and stops me settling for less. Frankly, the majority of us write in English and there are only so many practical rhymes one can have in English. We also write in western scales which all have 8 notes in them, and we only have a handful of keys to work with and the common changes are the ones that people are most comfortable with, particularly if you want a marketable song. Believe me, someone has done the same s*** that you're doing every way from Sunday.

Also - for all those people who believe that they are coming up with completely original material ripe to be ripped off, please understand that most of us start off imitating those we admire. The first song I wrote that I played live was called the Promised Land. It was, almost chord for chord, a rip off of the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name. Fortunately the springsteen song was obscure enough that no-one noticed.

I heard the two songs back to back and realized. I've played the song by request only since, but I had NO IDEA when I wrote it that it sounded so alike because I was too wrapped up in my creative process.

So lets face it, if you mail reaches the artist, which it won't, and they open it, which they won't, and they take time out of their busy schedule to listen, which they won't, then you're more likely to have ripped them off than they are to have ripped you off.

At $60 a pop then I could easily have spent $10,000 on copyrighting songs and I would have made $0 back in royalties from those songs. They got me a few nice paying gigs in bars and clubs, but a 300lb bar owner who smokes a pack a day and wouldn't know which side of a guitar you strum is hardly likely to make a million dollars off a song.

Thats not to say I've never done it and won't again, but I'm more worried about writing a song worthy of being ripped off than I am about someone stealing something I probably stole from someone else. Also, I apologize for the rant, this is something that used get to me when I'd see people spend hundreds of dollars copyrighting cliche, boring songs and then complain when they couldn't pay their rent.