‘Desk-Top Song Publishing’ for Songwriters A Reality

Feb. 10, 2009 - PRLog -- A possible solution to the age-old problem of Songwriters getting their work Published has been launched on the Internet. Scots muso and businessman Norman MacLeod has opened up the Internet’s first website fully dedicated to Songwriters’ Publishing and Copyrighting needs. The new, groundbreaking membership site is unlikely to win him any friends in the lucrative Music Publishing industry, however.

“I’ve been a muso all my life,” says Norman, “I learned all the chords for ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ when I was 14, jamming in the back of the bus going from Linlithgow to Aviemore in Scotland. Annoyed the hell out of the other kids for a good three hours, but I was oblivious.” Norman, now a resident of Mallorca, (an island off the coast of Spain for our global readers), has been running a Real Estate business for some years.

“It took a long time for me to get a ‘proper’ job, but feeding the kids took precedence. I kept on with my songwriting, though, and a few years back I had a couple of songs published by a UK-based Publisher. I was ecstatic at first, till I got my royalty cheque – it was such an insult, I almost had it framed. But the kids needed the shoes...”

A couple of years ago, Norman was driving to work. “It was a glorious, scorching Summer’s day. The sun was blazing in through the open sunroof. It was one of those good-to-be-alive days and I was enjoying driving a country lane, humming along with the radio that I had on - too loud. A rap track came on. I’m no big fan of rap, although some of these kids are clever,” admits Norman. “Suddenly, I found myself ‘rapping along’ with a part of the track. It was a bit surreal. Suddenly I realized I was ‘rapping’ the chorus to one of my songs – and a Country tune at that! I pulled the car over in a hurry and got the name of the artist.

“I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. You always think It’ll never happen to me, until it happens to you! I’d been royally ripped off. I knew it and it really ruined my day.”

Norman tried to contact the publisher that had ‘published’ the song in question. “He’d disappeared. It turned out that the actual demo itself had been released on a compilation by a minor Country Label in Nashville – I’d heard nothing about it – and then the middle 8 and the chorus had been ripped off and attributed to a German writer - and the rap tune had been recorded in Finland. To cut a long story short, it was such a convoluted rip-off, it was uneconomical to pursue and I never received a penny more. It wasn’t even a big hit, but my lawyer reckoned it would have given me maybe $120,000. That amount of money takes a long time to make these days!”

‘intelLoc™ DeskTop Publishing’ was the result. “I made a decent living out of music for a lot of years, and when I went into Real Estate I found that there were even more sharks than in the Music Business. I had to get very good at ‘negotiation’ very fast. Looking back, I realized that if I’d been a wee bit more savvy at business, I could have made a great living in music. I just hadn’t been doing what Colonel Tom Parker taught Elvis – TCB. ‘Taking Care of Business’. It’s a regret I live with to this day.”

intelLoc™ has been designed to let Songwriters publish their songs themselves, online, with a click of a mouse. “I’ve been a Google fan since it came online, and I’ve always liked the simplicity. You ‘click’ and you get a result. So I wanted intelLoc™ to work in the same way. So you just ‘click’ and you publish your song, copyright it, protect and showcase it too. I love it, and our members are brilliant at critiquing the system, so it keeps getting better.”

Reaction from the Music Biz has been less than enthusiastic. “We’ve had quite a bit of flak from the Industry,” quotes Norman. “With my experience in business and negotiation, I’ve been able to help other Songwriters with stuff they usually won’t learn until it’s too late. Real Estate contracts and Music Publishing contracts have a lot in common – get it wrong and it’ll cost you money for years. And once a deal is signed, you can do virtually nothing about it. You have to be hard-headed or the Music Biz ‘Pros’ will walk all over you. And boy, do they hate it when a Songwriter says ‘Wait a minute, I want to talk to my Lawyer about that.. ’  ”

Taking marketing advice, Norman resisted the ‘hard sell’ route. “Songwriters are by nature cautious about their intellectual property – and these days, quite rightly so. Copyright theft is running at about 7 million dollars per hour in the USA alone – that’s incredible. Plus there are so many cons out there on the ‘net, we decided to make this the softest sell you can imagine. Even though the membership fee is only $97 US dollars, our members can join and use the entire system for over three months – 105 days, actually. Any time within that  period, they can cancel and get their money back. No questions asked. Let the songwriters decide if they want to join. No pressure and no risk.”

So is intelLoc™  an altruistic venture? “Hell, no!” Norman affirms. “This has taken nearly a year to put together. We had to contract some fancy, secure, earthquake and virtually bomb-proof, dedicated  server with all kinds of encryption and backup stuff – this isn’t my area of expertise – in the USA, in Washington DC. It’s expensive to maintain, but at the end of the day, our members pay less than $2.50 a week to publish, copyright, showcase and store all their songs. It works and it’s great fun being in touch with other musos and songwriters. Much better than Real Estate!”

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intelLoc Publising & Copyright Services is an online self publishing application for songwriters and musicians around the world.