Music’s Middlemen

There is a gap--no, really, a canyon--between most aspiring songwriters and the movers and shakers of the music industry. Sheer volume mandates that most “unsolicited” submissions be tossed in the round file unheard. To be “solicited”--and thus to get your tape heard--you have to have a friend in the business.

Now anyone can have such a friend, if they’re willing to pay for one. In this vortex of art and commerce we call Los Angeles, it was only a matter of time before someone built a toll bridge.

Taxi, an independent artists-and-repertoire company based in Woodland Hills, shuttles music across the gap. The toll is $300 a year, plus $10 for each submitted song. And for a small percentage of the subscribers, the service pays off with actual music contracts.

That’s what George Nelson of Arleta hoped for. Nelson earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Cal State Northridge but wound up working as a telephone repairman after graduation. He recorded music in a home studio but didn’t have the time to market it. So he took it to Taxi.

Nelson admits that when he put down his $300 he wondered if Taxi was just another scam designed to separate him from his money. “Sure, I was leery,” Nelson admits. “But I figured I wasn’t going anywhere.”

Taxi was founded about five years ago by Michael Laskow, a music biz veteran who has worked with the likes of Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Cheap Trick and many others over the course of a 20-plus-year career.

For the $300 annual fee, Taxi’s staff of music industry veterans will listen to your tape, and if they like it, open some doors to music business decision makers. If they don’t like it, they’ll tell you why.

“It’s not just listening to the music,” Laskow says. “We have access to the industry the average person will never have in their entire lifetime.”

Arranging for someone to market your music is not a new concept. For decades, publishers have performed that function for a percentage of the songwriter’s profits. Paying money directly to someone just to listen to your music is not new either. But traditionally most legitimate music businesses did not operate that way. Laskow invites prospective subscribers to check Taxi out with the Better Business Bureau, because he realizes there’s a stigma attached to businesses like his.

“That’s because many of the people who did it before were crooks,” Laskow says. “We decided to take the high end. They also didn’t have the industry access that we have.”

Laskow runs Taxi out of his Woodland Hills apartment. The company publishes a biweekly newsletter that has about 50 listings of material being solicited for various musical projects. Wired subscribers can inspect the newsletter on America Online and others get it by mail.

Subscribers submit a tape for each listing they think their music fits, along with a $10 fee. Taxi’s screeners listen to all the tapes and select only a handful. Those tapes are forwarded directly to record label execs as “solicited” material, and they get listened to.

All tapes not forwarded--those other than the handful--are sent back to the subscriber with a written critique.

The Taxi staff of more than 50 screeners consists of former radio program directors, recording engineers, producers, songwriters and former record company execs. Laskow’s screening corps have included, among others: Aaron Jocoves, former vice president of A & R at Virgin and A & M Records; Barry Squire, former director of A & R at Warners; and Michael Leshay, former soundtrack agent at ICM.

“We get hundreds of tapes per day. Last year, we screened 40,000,” Laskow says. “Our screeners are people who are experts in a particular field of music.”

John Braheny was the co-founder of the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase, a nonprofit organization that was a fixture on the L.A. music scene from 1971 to 1992.

Like Taxi, the showcase acted as a bridge between songwriters and music industry decision makers. Unlike Taxi, the showcase was nonprofit, funded for many years by BMI. Braheny is well-known within the songwriters community for his vigilance against scams designed to take artists’ money. Braheny works for Taxi as a screener.

“What I responded to was that he asked the right questions,” Braheny says. “Sure he wanted to make money, but he had a genuine concern that there be a valuable service to offer.”

Braheny acknowledges that Taxi is not the answer for all songwriters and composers, but it does work well for some. Braheny says Laskow is tough on his screeners and requires them to provide meaningful feedback on critiques of submissions.

Critiques are done on an 8 1/2-by-11-inch pre-printed sheet of questions regarding style, title, structure, melody, and lyrics, with a grid for an overall rating.

“He really wants them to say what’s wrong with the song,” Braheny says.

Laskow says more than 300 deals have been signed by Taxi subscribers since its inception. The service currently has about 3,500 subscribers.

“We’re not just about getting people recording deals,” Laskow says. “We’ve been very successful in getting people’s music in television and film projects.”

George Nelson is a prime example.

“We gave his talent the conduit to get heard by the right people,” says Laskow.

Nelson says he wanted to write music for films since he saw his first movie, “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,” when he was 7 years old. His major influences were John Williams, Aaron Copland and Jerry Goldsmith.

Although originally a percussionist, Nelson wrote an award-winning organ prelude and fugue in college. He quit writing music in the 1980s when he was working for Pacific Bell, but in the early ‘90s he assembled a home studio. He started writing orchestral pieces, performing all the parts himself, using synthesizers and other modern recording equipment.

During his first eight months with Taxi, he had 20 submissions returned with critiques. But he wasn’t discouraged.

“The feedback helped me a great deal,” Nelson says. “The screeners had no interest in not helping me--they’d been working in the music business and I’d been climbing telephone poles.”

He also liked Taxi for what it didn’t do. Nelson, an African American, was previously encouraged by other industry types to compose dance and soul music. But that wasn’t his forte. And he did not receive that advice at Taxi.

Finally, he made his first sale to a music library house. Then jobs on several low-budget film, television and animated series followed. When his income from music grew larger than his salary, he quit his job at the telephone company.

Although he’s not on the Billboard Hot 100 or working with Steven Spielberg, he’s making a living. And he’s living his dream instead of climbing poles.

“Taxi was the only place I had to go to,” Nelson says. “It just felt right, and they did right by me.”