Recording Music: Writing Songs for an Album

Video Transcript

"Now you'll want to decide what type of album you're going to make. Will this be an album of original material, songs that you've written? Will it be an album of songs that you've co-written with other people, either band members or friends or people that you would write music with? Or will this be an album of covers, songs that other people have written? Or it can be mix and match. You can have some of all three of those possibilities. Now if you're going to make a cover album, you're going to need to pay royalties to the people that wrote the song. So you'll need to make sure that that's a part of your budget when you're figuring out how much money you're going to spend on this project. Now especially if you sell a lot of albums or if it's on radio, you'll be having to pay royalties each time those songs are performed or aired. Now if it's original material, these will be your songs so you won't have to worry about that so much. But there is, obviously, more work involved as far as writing your own songs. So you might want to decide what type of music you're going to put on the disc, and whether they'll be original or cover tunes."