Dear Passengers,

How much effort is enough? How do you know when you’ve given the music business your best shot and it simply wasn’t enough?

I saw this very issue debated on our forum. Somebody was ready to give up on songwriting because he felt that he had given it all he had, and the wall was too high for him to get over. I had three reactions to what he had written.

1) He was frustrated and wanted his friends on the forum to talk him out of quitting.

2) How badly did he really want to be in the music business?

3) How much effort had he really given it?

Showing up is not enough.

Joining TAXI, making a dozen submissions and going home with your tail between your legs is not a path to a music career. Setting up a MySpace page and racking up 2,147 fake friends is not enough. Hanging out on Facebook from your cubicle at work is not enough. Sending out a few Tweets about your show on Friday night is not enough.

Yes, the tools are there for the taking, but it’s relentless effort that wins the day. You already knew that. So did the guy trying to get talked out of quitting the music business.

Yes, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and all the other tools save you printing and postage costs while building a fan base. But your songs still have to be great. Not good enough, but great! That takes focus, work and time.

Yes, TAXI brings a hundred opportunities for your music right to your computer every month, but your music still has to be great. Not good enough, but great!

Yes, the tools make it easier that it has ever been before, but they don’t mean that you get to become a successful songwriter with less effort. It means you can accomplish more in the same amount of time.

If you use those tools to get more done per hour and treat your music like a full-time job, then you can succeed in the music business. You get to determine your own timeline. You have more control than you might want to admit. If You don’t succeed, you can really only blame yourself.

Want to know how I know that? Read about Diane Warren, then come back and carefully comb through our Music Industry Listings to find a path for your talent.

Talk to you soon,
Michael

Dear Passengers,

It is said that, “a man’s wealth can be measured by his friends.” Assuming that’s true, I am fabulously wealthy, indeed.

I never imagined how many of my old friends would come out of the woodwork when I started TAXI seventeen years ago. Several of them showed up at the Country Songwriting seminar I did in Nashville last week, and it was great to see them all. One of them has been a friend since the ’70s!

One of the “responsibilities” — if you can call it that — of having so many friends that are also TAXI members is that they sometimes ask me to give them advice. “Hey Michael, I’ve got this song about falling in love on Facebook. Which TAXI opportunity would be my best shot?”

Being the guy who is so wealthy with friends, those requests really add up when you consider how many TAXI members have become my friends over the years. No complaints! How many CEOs can claim hundreds of their customers as friends?

Trying to be a nice guy and a good friend, I try to answer every email I get. I average over 300 emails per day, Monday through Friday. I get just under 150 per day on weekends. Sadly, I can no longer keep up with them all.

Because many of the emails are from friends not wanting to scroll through the multitude of TAXI’s Industry Listings to find the most lucrative for them, I’ve asked my tech staff to come up with a solution that will be showing up on the new TAXI website which is under construction as we speak.

In the mean time, you can use a prototype version of what I affectionately call our “Genre Picker” by going to this page, and scrolling about a third of the way down to find it. Or you can click on the links below to go to the genres of your choice!

Thanks again to all of my friends who took the time and traveled far to join me in Nashville. It was great to see you as always.

Talk to you soon,
Michael

P.S. Here’s the link to the page with the Genre Picker again, in case you didn’t click it above!