If you sing gospel music, whether professionally or casually, you know one of the most difficult things to do is find great new, original music for your next album or single.

Unless you’re a songwriter yourself, you are at the mercy of the connections you’ve made, the label you work with, or sheer happenstance. But what if there was a different way?

What if there was a way to find new, original music, that didn’t sound like every other cut and was exactly the right song for you?

Illustrating the Problem

Suppose you’re a well-known gospel recording artist, traveling each weekend to play at churches and events. You interact with hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Many of these people are songwriters and would love nothing more than to pitch one of their songs to you.

On any given weekend, you probably talk to 5-10 of these people (if not way more), most of whom hand you a CD of a song they’ve written in hopes you’d listen and eventually sing it.

As you only have so much time, and frankly, so much patience to listen to everyone’s new song idea, you eventually give in. You don’t have the time or energy to listen to these songs. So, the CDs accumulate on the dashboard of the bus.

Every few months, you throw away another giant batch of CDs.

One of them might have been your next big hit. But you’ll never know, because you didn’t have time to listen.

Now suppose you’re a casual artist, playing the occasional church function or special service. You don’t consider yourself a very good songwriter, so you mostly cover well-known songs and knowingly sprinkle in a few mediocre originals to give you some chance of standing out.

You’d love the opportunity to work with a songwriter known for producing great songs, but either they have their own circle of friends who get dibs on the best songs or they work for a publishing company with the rights to all their music, such that only certain artists are even entertained as a candidate to record the song.

You begin the long process of networking your way into a relationship with writers, but this takes years, and sometimes never works at all.

These are two very different scenarios with ultimately the same core problem: There’s nowhere to find a collection of great, original songs available for you to record.

Finding a Solution

As the founders of BuyDemoTracks.com, Jared Easter and I set out to solve an entirely different problem around three years ago. As a successful demo studio owner, Jared kept encountering two common issues:

First, Jared produces radio-ready demos. That means his demos are produced with professional quality and a ton of thought goes into each one. But once a song is picked up by an artist, it’s almost inevitably going to be re-recorded for that artist’s particular style and taste.

This means there is a professionally produced demo asset (which is expensive for the songwriter to produce!) collecting dust.

Second, while Jared works with many professional songwriters, he also works with many still rising the ranks. He’d often get the question: “Ok, so what’s next? How do we get this song in the hands of the right people?”

Out of these two questions, BuyDemoTracks.com was born.

The idea?

Give gospel music demos a “home on the Internet” where songwriters could potentially recoup some of their investment by providing paid access to their soundtracks, and a way to send people to a library of their songs.

It wasn’t long into the development of this idea that we realized what we were actually sitting on: A filterable library of incredible songs from both successful and up-and-coming songwriters. That’s when the lightbulb went off.

Song Funnels and the Future of the Music Industry

We’ve worked hard to make our song library one-of-a-kind. As I write this, there is nowhere else on the Internet to find a collection of unrecorded new gospel music.

But not only that, you can find exactly the song you need. Want a fast song, in the Key of B, about trucks or trains? You can find that on our site. Want a holiday-themed song that’s a little slower-paced, in a key fit for a male vocalist? It’s in our library.

The tools are there. All we need is more artists using our platform to find new songs, and more songwriters using our platform to showcase their demos.

We call this process a “song funnel.” The idea comes from the “sales funnel” in the marketing world. Once you start the process, you can funnel/filter down to exactly the song you want or need.

This may seem small, but actually, there are a few significant ways this could have long-term effects on the music industry:

Competition

What’s missing from the music industry—at least the writing side of it—is competition. It’s not really “may the best song win” right now. It’s, “may the most well-connected person win.”

This is not always bad, and to be sure, this usually results in fantastic songwriters having a chance at their songs getting cut after years (sometimes decades) of hard work and a few lucky breaks.

But it’s hard to break in since everything happens behind on closed doors and in text messages between friends.

Even those relationships don’t guarantee success or that you’ll get a song cut, though, because sometimes an artist will put a song on “hold” for months at a time. This simply isn’t fair to the writer, who is being asked (with zero compensation) to hold the only asset he has in terms of making a living—his songs!

A marketplace like ours introduces competition and allows everyone to play on the same level. For the song to win, it must simply be the best option on the platform at the time someone is looking for it.

Better Songs

One big problem in the music industry right now is milquetoast songs. Record labels mostly control what music goes out, and often this is based on listener data from what people tend to respond to.

This sounds fine until you come to grips with the fact that this means most new music ends up sounding the same. Originality is lost.

With a diverse array of perspectives welcome, our platform allows for all kinds of new music to see the limelight and hopefully make it to the listener.

A Path for Writers

Thanks to the introduction of competition, there is now a path—an answer to the question, “Ok, my demo’s done, now what?”

There’s a light at the end of that tunnel.

Once a songwriter has a demo produced, it can be uploaded to our platform. From there, it can be ranked on our HeartChart, shared with colleagues and potential artists, and more. It’s like having a personal business card/resume on the Internet with your professionally produced music available to listen to.

Then, what if their song is picked up and becomes popular? Well, BuyDemoTracks.com makes it easy to sell your demo as a soundtrack for those wanting to sing it in church or record it on an album of their own. The songwriter is compensated for those earnings through our site.

A Solution for Artists

Finally, it solves the problems that have plagued artists for years, many of which we’ve already mentioned.

It allows your music to get better, it allows you to find new songs without having to wade through piles of CDs, and it gives you a place to refer those songwriters who want to hand you their CDs every weekend.

Simply tell them that you have partnered with BuyDemoTracks.com as your trusted resource to find new, original music. And you’ll know that if the song has made it through our process of working with the writer to create the best song and demo possible, it’s worthy of a listen.

This one simple platform can fix so much of what is currently wrong with the music industry. We’re proud to have developed it and excited to see how you use it to further your career in music.