Taxi Week, Taxi Weekend

This weekend, we will be attending the annual Taxi Road Rally.

Taxi is an independent A&R company, really a remarkable product of this brave new world of recording and music. Taxi serves as a place where 2 groups of people can work together. 1. Companies and producers who need music for any and all purposes. 2. Songwriters and musicians who wish to supply that music and get paid for it.

Basically, it works like this. You sign up for Taxi, which costs about $300 a year for membership. You then get listings for all the opportunities that Taxi has to offer, which are updated twice a month. Taxi’s literature claims that there are 1200 a year. If you see one and think that one of your songs has a shot, you submit it via your account, which costs an additional $5 a pop.

A Taxi rep then reviews your work, and either approves of denies it. If it’s approved, it then goes on to the actual company looking for the material. We have had 4 tunes selected by Taxi reps thus far, but no actual deals signed. So… we keep at it.

I thought that it was hooey, until I met these guys. Andy and Adam were the songwriters and producers on one of the tunes I sang on for Cheetah Girls 3, and they are also poster boys for Taxi. They got their big break through Taxi, a song that many of you have heard called “Beautiful Soul,” for Jesse McCartney. Since then, they have piled on success after success.

They told me that the Taxi thing is legit, and that it works if the material is good.

So, off to the Road Rally we go, starting tomorrow night. We have the kiddies with Grandma and Grampa, and a room in the hotel where the convention is located. It’s a three day convention and, from what we hear, schmooze fest.

This past monday, I spent a good chunk of the day in the car to assure that we’d have something professional to pass out. So, first, it was Thousand Oaks to Ojai and back. Ojai is where Doug Sax has moved his Mastering Lab after 30+ years of shlepping Hollywood. We have been working hard of a few final revisions, and it hit me that we needed a mastered disc like… yesterday, so we got in the car and got it ourselves to save the extra day the Post Office would have taken.

We got home, and I turned right around and headed out to Glendale, where our duplication house is located. We need a hundred or so of these things in less than 72 hours, so time was of the essence.

Everything has worked out beautifully, and tomorrow, we will pick up the first 100 copies of our finalized CD. It will be the exact same material we hope to bring to you, minus all the cool artwork. Plus, we put our cell phone numbers on these, which, no offense, we most likely won’t include in the final artwork.

So, if you’ve made it this far in my epic blog, and you wish to send some positive thoughts our way this weekend, we need it. If you’re the praying type, we need it. If you want to use The Secret… well… whatever works for you.

We need a breakthrough this weekend. We need someone to hear us, and say… “I have this client who needs music for this iPod ad we’re working on, and we’d like to pay you money right here and now!”

Ok, not really. But we need something to happen. We don’t have time to go play 12,000 bar gigs to raise a following. We need a break.