One of my New Year’s resolutions at the beginning of 2024 was to write, record, and release twenty-four songs during the year.
This represented a significant change for me. Usually it takes me a long time to complete a song. This is partly because I begin by throwing the proverbial kitchen sink at it. It then takes time to delete the parts I love but that do not serve the story I am trying to tell. It’s also because I tend to overthink my songs.
Three distinct lessons I had learned prior to 2024 motivated me to accelerate my songwriting process without sacrificing quality.
- The first was a hundred-day writing challenge that I completed in 2018. Starting on August 17 of that year, I wrote something every day for a hundred days. Twenty-one of those writings proved worthwhile. Ten more contained sections that I later used in other stories. The rest went into what I call The Vault, a repository that most artists maintain. It is a brutalization of the Eagles’ lyrics in “Hotel California”: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
- The second lesson came from Motown. Having spent much of my life in and around Detroit, I have long drawn inspiration from the work ethic of the people in both the automotive industry and at Motown Records, which Berry Gordy Jr. founded in 1959. Not only do I love the music, but it is impressive how much those artists and businesspeople accomplished each day.
- The third lesson came from Derek Sivers. I met him years after he founded CD Baby, which at one point was the second-largest retailer of music CDs in the world, behind only Amazon. In a TEDx talk about quantity and quality in the arts, he made a point that has stayed with me.
Starts at the 1:28 time mark.
The math seemed simple enough: write, record, and release two songs per month for a year.
I faced two main challenges.
- The first was shifting my mindset back to the one I had cultivated during the hundred-day writing challenge. After the second month, I had established a productive cadence. The key to success was becoming comfortable with putting seventy-five to eighty percent of what I created into The Vault, regardless of how far along in the process a given song was. This included pieces that were technically ready for release (mixed, mastered, and complete with artwork) but that did not meet the standard I set for myself.
- The second challenge was assembling teams of collaborators to help record the songs. Scheduling high-quality musicians and engineers can be difficult. I ended up forming three rotating teams of studio musicians, mix engineers, and mastering engineers. Because my own vocals are not strong enough to carry a lead, the artists focused primarily on singing. I also regularly worked with studio drummers to replace the demo drum tracks I had recorded, and on occasion with studio guitar, piano, organ, string, and horn players. Another priority was securing two additional mix engineers, since I was determined to release everything in high-resolution stereo (96kHz, 24 bit) as well as in Dolby Atmos.
By the end of the year I had released forty-one songs, with the rest consigned to The Vault. I was still putting about seventy-five percent of my output into The Vault, so the real magic was simply writing more: an average of approximately three songs per week, for a yearly total of one hundred and sixty.
Can quantity lead to quality?
The answer is yes.
While I still take multiple years to complete some songs, owing to my genuine enjoyment of a long, immersive writing and recording process that can be deeply satisfying in its own right (much as I imagine Tom Scholz of Boston and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys relish it), it is also plain fun to disappear down a rabbit hole. Like Scholz, who is himself an engineer, I spent part of 2024 developing new methods, hardware, and software to create distinctive sounds.
How does this help you?
Today, I’m still writing at the same cadence I established in 2024. What has changed is how I release the music, a response to the sheer volume of new songs produced each day by both humans and artificial intelligence.
Rather than competing in the streaming services’ “Red Ocean strategy,” I’ve pivoted to releasing all my work through Patreon. This shift came after I fully embraced Kevin Kelly’s 2008 essay “1,000 True Fans.” Kelly was the founding executive editor of Wired magazine.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and You
After five years of working with AI, beginning with business-process streamlining, I’ve learned a great deal about how to collaborate with it effectively. In the arts, four distinct camps have emerged:
- The first camp consists of artists who create one hundred percent human work and largely shun AI.
- The second incorporates AI tools into the creative process, much as I do. For example, I use AI the same way Brian Eno used synthesizers: my goal is to “break” the technology and push it in directions its creators never intended. By deliberately forcing the AI to hallucinate, I generate sounds that are genuinely unique that I then chop-up and use as new sounds in my synthesizers.
- A third camp uses AI to co-write songs. As Rick Beato has noted, many of the top songwriters and producers have quietly adopted this hybrid model.
- The fourth camp consists of pure AI music-generating factories. Deezer estimates that these operations release more than 75,000 songs per day and now account for nearly half of all music released daily. The model is highly profitable because of its minimal costs. Surveys suggest that, when listeners do not know a track was AI-generated, they cannot distinguish it from human-made music fifty-seven percent of the time.
This raises an essential question for every artist: Are you an artist operating within the music business, or are you a business that happens to create music? I place myself firmly in the former category.
Yet everyone must answer these questions for themselves, both about their relationship to AI and about how they wish to position the business side of their music.
The Future
Given all that has happened in the music industry, from the ongoing decline in streaming revenue sharing to the relentless weekly advances in AI, 2026 has become the year in which I am reexamining the quantity-quality equation from a fresh perspective.
My plan is to keep writing and recording as much as possible so that the strongest pieces have a better chance of rising to the surface, while taking a more deliberate approach to how much music I actually release each year on Patreon.
Contact me today if you need help with speeding up your own process.
For the details about “how-to,” weekly tips, and sharing behind-the-scenes of creating images, music and words: you’re invited to join my Patreon.