• What are the (academic and professional) qualifications and/or experience required to enter the profession? 

To enter this profession, you will need some understanding of music theory, instrumentation, lyrical ability, and creativity, using your imagination to bring originality to your music. You will also need to know how to produce your own music and operate various DAWs. Additionally, you must be able to set up your stage for gigs and busking, knowing what equipment to use and how to use it. Good communication skills are essential for discussing your vision for your songs with band members and communicating effectively with other roles in the music industry. Furthermore, having experience in writing, such as poetry, books, stories, or co-writing songs and collaborating with other music professionals, is important. For collaboration, you need to be a good networker and know how to stay in touch with others for future assistance on your projects. 

• What knowledge, skills and personal qualities/attributes are needed for success within the profession? 

Being able to write lyrics either in a poetic way or a storytelling way, or deeply and emotionally, using rhymes and metaphors for imagery and similarity, also writing lyrics which are relatable to the audience to connect with them. Being able to critically view your work and songs to progress them and to analyse the popular techniques used by other artists to create a successful song. Knowing how to use DAWs such as Logic Pro, Ableton, and FL Studio is useful, as it can help you, as a songwriter, to produce the sound you’re looking for and be confident enough to do it yourself. Collaborating skills are needed to be a songwriter, since you have to collaborate with many people in the music industry to create a song or an album and see what other people’s opinions are on the song and what they think should be added. Skilled writers know to be a master of their craft, they must write whether they feel like it or not. I have taken this quote from the website “Song Town”, “Skilled creators realise they don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike to create. They begin the task and invite inspiration to join them.” This quote tells people that being a songwriter can be hard for new artists, but to be a skilled songwriter, you keep writing lyrics even when you don’t have any inspiration.

With personal qualities and attributes, persistence and determination is needed in the music industry since it is a competitive and hardworking industry, with lots of competition to be original and unique with complex songs. Artists need to push forward and keep going in a creative direction since the music industry can be unfair or hard to be noticed in. Self-discipline and a strong work ethic are a must as a songwriter since you must be able to tell yourself when something hasn’t worked in a song or needs to be changed, because that’s how we grow from creative ideas and turn them into something better with discipline. Creativity and originality is very important if you want to be unique in your songwriting and music. It’s also important to experiment with new sounds and ideas for lyrics, melodies, production, and instrumentation. Being open-minded is important in this industry, as you need to be open to trying new genres of music and different ideas that could help advance your career and skill if you want to learn more about songwriting.

• What are the duties and responsibilities of the profession – what does a typical day’s work involve? 

 A day’s work in the songwriting profession includes a lot of brainstorming, coming up with new ideas and going back to old work to see if you could use any of those ideas or make progress on them. “The most important undertaking of my day is to simply sit down at my desk and pick up my pen. Without this elementary act, I could not call myself a songwriter, because songs come to me in intimations too slight to be perceived, unless I am primed and ready to receive them. They come not with a fanfare, but in whispers, and they come only when I am at work.” This quote is from “Nick Cave on the writing process.” This is a very useful quote since a lot of songwriters struggle to find inspiration or don’t know where to start, but Nick Cave’s quote says that to start writing a song, you need to sit at a desk, pick up a pen and just wait, brainstorm, or view other people’s work for inspiration. Songwriters usually spend the day testing out different ways to write lyrics for a song, it could be from writing a poem or a few lines from a book theyve made. They do this to practice their writing skills and play with words; they eventually come up with a few lines that could be metaphorical, complex or just simple lyrics that work together. After the writing process begins, they further their ideas by applying musical instruments and using their music theory knowledge to advance the song. Once they have found a starting point, they would begin experimenting with different sounds as they build the song’s structure. They will ask others for their opinions on the song and start recording live artists for a demo version, which will later become a finished project over the weeks.

• What are the main financial and legal issues that impact on this profession? 

The low streaming revenue is difficult to make money from, since companies like Spotify and Apple Music take most of the money songwriters are supposed to receive, leaving them with very little. When releasing a song, the royalties for songwriters are very low, which means they don’t get paid a lot for the work they’ve done. This makes it hard to live off if that is your only source of income. To be a new artist/songwriter, you will need another job other than making an income from royalties, since sometimes you won’t even get paid if you have a low streaming rate. It will be nearly impossible to live off the tiny percentage of royalties you get as a songwriter. Here is a quote from Julian Knight that supports my answer: “While streaming has brought significant profits to the recorded music industry, the talent behind it – performers, songwriters and composers – are losing out.”

For legal issues, copyright can be tricky to navigate. To avoid copyright issues, you need to own the rights to your music, lyrics and ensure you’re getting the correct royalty share. Make sure you are licensed as well. For example, there are Sync licences, which are used for TV/Films, so if your music gets played on a movie or a TV show, you will get your share of money. Artificial intelligence is also an issue for copyright law. The rise of AI is raising questions about copyright ownership and compensation for AI-generated music, as you can see in this quote from Will Simpson: “It’s complicated. If it’s a purely AI creation based on, say, The Beatles, then obviously copyright should go to Lennon and McCartney. But what if another human creator makes choices and changes? We only have to look at things that are not AI, where you have legal cases – Marvin Gaye and Pharrell, for example. Where does the copyright lie? What is inspiration, what is production and what is composing? At least in that case, there were humans on both sides rather than a robot.”

• What would the potential marketing and promotional aspects of this profession look like?

To market and promote your songs, you will need to maintain an online profile, maximising opportunities via social media, taking advantage of ‘word of mouth’ recommendations, and posting regularly on social media platforms, which will boost the algorithm to show your videos/songs to a wider audience. Social Media can be a very powerful thing to become noticed on and a very popular way that people use to get recognised, as you can see in this quote, “By having social media profiles on the major platforms (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), you can easily get heard by a lot of people. Just imagine that Facebook recently announced it has about 1 billion active users on its platform. That’s really huge, if you ask me, and you don’t need that many people to be successful. All you need is a way to reach some of those people–preferably within your local community–so you can build up your fan base. By posting your lyrics and songs you have completed online, you get to have people connect with you and your brand.” Another way to promote yourself as a songwriter is to start going to open mic nights, signing up to do gigs, and busking. These activities can start the word going around in the audience, for example, some people may book you for gigs or weddings, which can put you out there even more. A rare occasion could be that someone from a record label is watching you perform and wants to sign a contract with you for a record deal.

• What are the intellectual and personal challenges presented by the profession and how might these be dealt with?

Writer’s block can be hard to deal with when you’re a songwriter. You don’t know what to write down, and it can be hard to get words or emotions into lyrics and make them feel relatable or deep and meaningful. To overcome this, you could go back to old songs or ideas and try to develop them, or listen to some of your favourite artists to see if you get any inspiration from them or to interpret anything they’ve done into your songs, but make it your own style or experiment with it. Some of the personal challenges would be emotional vulnerability and being so open about your emotions. It can be hard to write down all of your emotions and feelings into a song for other people to listen to, which can also lead to writer’s block because sometimes you just need a push from another inspiration.

Evaluating your own work is also a personal challenge because you’ll need to evaluate everything you write and make. You’ll need to evaluate the lyrics you’re writing to see if you think the audience will receive the emotions you want to portray, and make sure the instruments you’ve added are the right choice for the song and that they echo the emotion from the lyrics. To deal with this, I would ask for feedback on my work, then I would get a sense of what people are looking for and see what changes I can make based on the feedback others have given. Rejection and criticism can be challenging, but they can also be good for you, as you need to be open-minded and take advice from others. People criticising your music isn’t always a bad thing since it can open you to new inspiration, and other people’s opinions can improve the music and the outcome it has on the audience.

• What career-progression/development opportunities are available within the profession? 

There are many opportunities for songwriters to develop their careers. For example, a commercial songwriter is a songwriter who works for publishing companies and writes songs for other established recording artists. This often involves working to a specific brief given by these companies. Another similar role is a Lyricist. Lyricists’ roles mainly focus on writing the lyrics for a song, often collaborating with the composer of the music. Another type of lyricist is a musical theatre writer, who writes and is involved in composing songs for the musical. A top-line songwriter is a good way to develop your career as a songwriter because this is a specialised role that focuses on writing the melody and lyrics for an already produced song, often for pop or dance music. As a songwriter, you can also go into the role of a Performer/recording artist. Many songwriters like to perform and release their original music. This path involves personal branding, touring and building your own fan base.

SHR4C007R~001~25102012~Research portfolio bibliography 

I, Uche. (2025) how-to-promote-yourself-and-get-clients-as-a-songwriter 

Knight, J. (2021) 57833179 

Mills, C. (2025) skilled-songwriters-skills 

Muscians Union. (2023) marketing-and-promotion 

Simpson, B. (2021) nick-cave-on-the-writing-process 

Simpson, W. (2023) how-artificial-intelligence-affects-musicians-music-and-copyright