Profile: Songsinc

We sat down with Songsinc owner and creator Andrea Standley and Songsinc partner Gia DeSantis to talk about their company and their TrackShop and MelodyShop platforms.

Andrea and Gia have a wealth of music industry experience between them: Andrea is a prolific songwriter as well as major label veteran, working for Warner Bros. Records for 27 years in marketing, promotion, video, an dproduction. She eventually became the lead analyst, helping to design many of the data systems still in use today by the label.

Gia is a 25-year music and entertainment industry veteran, beginning her career as a KROQ DJ and host of the highly acclaimed Los Angeles market music video program, “Request Video.” She spent 15 years with major labels in video and marketing (Reprise and Capitol), and went on to develop her own independent marketing and promotion company called Pretty Mouthy Marketing, contracted by Warner Bros. Records, Disney, Sony, Universal Music Group as well as other artist management firms and independent labels.

When did you come up with the idea for Songsinc?

Andrea: I’m going to say the late nineties. I used to come here and pitch songs and go through the whole thing and I would cut tracks. The guys there talked me into keeping the backing tracks. Then as I would pitch songs, I would hear people say: ‘I don’t like the storyline of this.’ So I would consciously just go in, take the backing track, rewrite a new melody and lyric and re-pitch it and find that I got fairly decent success with re-pitching a completely different song using the same exact track.

About 2002, the light bulb went on and I realized I needed to do something with this. There is something important here about being able to do this and to collaborate with people that have great tracks that might not have 1,000 bucks to go and produce them. Near the end of 2006, we actively started to build the site and we have been testing ever since then.

We want to offer the tracks as samples, because the sample legal operation is already going, everybody understands what a sample is. The legal mechanism is in place.

Everyone is familiar with sampling, but not everyone is versed in the legal aspects of it. What is your role in getting this across to clients?

Andrea: Basically, the download fee is the licensing fee that you’re paying for the specific rights to use that track to create a song. That download fee is split between the master owner and the publisher of the original track, or if you are one and the same, you share that download fee with Songsinc. That’s basically the royalty fee. Track owners who give us tracks, or master owners who give us tracks, they are earning. The fee that they are getting for these tracks is 50 percent of the download fee and 50 percent of what we call “buy-in” fee, which allows the songwriter more rights to use that track or the song created with that track. So, they are constantly making money instead of a one-time fee that a label or an artist would pay at a label and a publisher to use a sample. They realize that one track will be downloaded over and over again, so they are always going to be earning 50 percent of the download fee and 50 percent of any buy-in fees.

Could you talk a little more about the concept of track-writing?

Andrea: Probably writing to tracks, writing to beats – that’s a standard thing in industry, especially in the urban market. Track-writing, is a far more intimate relationship and collaboration with the composer, and it literally is taking a lot of the track to inspire new melodies and lyrics that you place within that track, giving you an opportunity to create a really good-sounding sound-demo master that you can pitch and share with the world without having to pay for the production of the track.

What is the breakdown among genres for your clients, if you had to guess?

Andrea: You are going to look at pop, rock, alt and dance as being your primary market. But country, because so many songwriters love to do that and it can crossover into pop, it’s right there with them as well. We are also going for Indian music, Japanese music, Spanish music, Latin and ethnic, and we are opening it up to the world.

Now Melody Shop, this was a new venture.

Gia: It’s perfect for someone like me who doesn’t play an instrument or can’t write a song per se, but I can write a poem, I can write a lyric and I can go and I can find something and be like, you know, that genre fits really nicely with this kooky little ditty that I just cooked up.

When I start talking to [people], and if it’s someone who isn’t in the music, they aren’t songwriters, they don’t have the technicality of writing a song down, and I start to tell them about MelodyShop their eyes immediately – really? I can do that?

Andrea: The starting point with MelodyShop was lyricists, because they don’t have the melodies in their head, but they have the words. It’s tough. They are probably dying to find composers.

A lot of aspiring musicians and writers live in the middle of nowhere. They have a hard time finding a producer and collaborators.

Andrea: And think of MelodyShop. By the time we are finished, we are going to have thousands of melodies and more. Imagine this: you tell lyricists and poets anywhere in the world that they can go to one place and they have thousands of melodies that they can choose from and there are world-wide collaborations with composers. Now, you tell songwriters that if they want to earn some royalties and they want to participate in this exceptional concept of earning income fairly from Songsinc, they can download a track from TrackShop, they can create a melody, add that in the line above the track, return it to us, and we will put it into MelodyShop, and every time that is downloaded, they’ll share the download fee with the track owner and they will be the melody writer. Now, they have a way to earn income by sharing their melody.

Has that aspect been used a lot?

Andrea: We just came up with MelodyShop. I have three major writers right now, two that have done it, and we are doing a major launch on Broadjam, plus a couple of other places in August which will coincide with this.

A lot of musicians  that have been on labels in the past are now adopting a do-it-yourself approach, in terms of producing and recording and even marketing. How does Songsinc jibe with this trend?

Andrea: The artists that I’ve spoken with are all very enthusiastic about the idea. It’s kind of like hey, I haven’t thought of that. Let me kind of chew on that. So to say that yeah, right now they are embracing it– it’s starting. It’s something that’s been tested for a long time, but only recently come on board. The reception has been really good.

Most artists have a mindset of, “it comes from me and I do it and I release it.” We are looking for what is normal. Most stuff is sitting in your shelves and sitting in your vaults and sitting in labels where an artist had two hits and the fourth cut on that album two is never going to make him a dime. We are telling the world that those are assets, that everyone thought were dead. It’s going to be so amazing getting them and allowing the world to use them and bring them back to some amazing kind of life.