Socializing Rejection and Failure in Artistic Occupational Communities

Socialization in Occupational Communities

For an individual to be able to act agentically within the structures of any social group, he or she must know the culture of the group and adopt the cultural schemas that enable or constrain choices and behaviors in the group (Sewell, 1992). In bureaucratic contexts, socialization is the acquisition of knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral dispositions which make up the organization’s cultural schemas; when it comes to individuals interacting in organizations, norms and values are most successfully internalized through formal education and through interacting with bureaucracies as a worker or as a customer (Danet & Gurevitch, 1972). Socialization is especially important at work because alignment with the norms and values of a workplace or industry can influence how successful an individual will be throughout his or her career. The behavior and attitudes of high-status individuals in a workplace serve as a model for individuals who wish to be upwardly mobile (Vorwaller, 1970), and low-status individuals in groups tend to conform, thus validating extant status hierarchies (Kalkhoff, 2005). Proper socialization is key to worker agency and occupational mobility.

Increasingly, employment relations are tending toward flexibility and instability with workers taking on more risk as employers adopt practices that employ fewer workers (Cornfield, Campbell, & McCammon, 2001; Smith, 1997). Outside of traditional employer–employee work relationships, nonstandard employment relations (e.g., freelancing, project-based employment, and self-employment) are increasing in prevalence (Barley & Kunda, 2004; Neff, 2012; Osnowitz, 2010; Ruef, 2010; Smith, 2001). In the United States, there exist many occupation or industry-based organizations, clubs, and initiatives that seek to educate or retrain workers to meet the challenges of managing the demands of these new working relationships. Such organizations have been the focus of some employment research (e.g., Smith, 2001; Van Oort, 2015) and appear incidentally, rather than as a focal area of inquiry, in scholarship that focuses on precarious work and the changing face of employment (e.g., Padavic, 2005; Sharone, 2007).

In light of transitions in employment structures, workers may come to identify with their particular occupation over an identity based on industry or company affiliation. The outcome of this process is the formation of occupational communities, groups of individuals who generally do the same sort of work, who share perspectives and an overall positive attitude toward their work, and whose work and personal lives frequently meld together (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984). Within occupational communities, workers hear about new work opportunities, connect with potential collaborators, and form relationships based on shared work and social interests (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010; Neff, 2012; Osnowitz, 2010). In hybrid social-professional communities, workers must learn to navigate appropriate behavior.

The characteristics of nonstandard employment relations will be familiar to those who study artistic careers. Trends in creative industries have been likened to “canaries in the mine” (p. 340) for larger employment and labor dynamics (Lingo & Tepper, 2013). Employment and unemployment in the arts rise simultaneously as demand for artistic labor is outpaced by the supply of aspirants (Menger, 1999). The competitive nature fostered in this context is further intensified as technology has democratized the means of production and distribution (e.g., YouTube, Etsy, Patreon, Kickstarter) and by the fact that age, sex and gender, socioeconomic status, education, and other personal characteristics do not formally preclude individuals from creating and selling art.

Rejection and Labor Market Failure

Rejection in work situations is generally experienced as “bad news” that results in a “perceived loss” by the recipient (Bies, 2013, pp.137–138). Goffman’s (1952) discussion of “cooling the mark” (p. 452) strategies or justifications toward lessening the sting of failure is the basis for the predominating line of thought around how bad news regarding rejection or failure is doled out. This conception of how individuals deal with losing status in a given role has been used to describe how aspiring novelists (Fürst, 2016), reality television contestants (van den Scott, Forstie, & Balasubramanian, 2014; Wei, 2016), and aspiring air traffic control workers (Hallier & James, 2000) process and respond to failure in their chosen field. When a person experiences rejection, he or she does not immediately concede failure. Rather, they interpret and frame the experience by either accepting or dismissing the failure and then accepting or rejecting responsibility for that failure (Fürst, 2016). Some may try to regain status or reacquire a role, seeing failure or rejection as a learning experience (Wei, 2016). Through using these strategies, aspirants are able to reconcile their identities and self-worth with their experiences of rejection.

In situations where cooperation and cohesion are important to group function, research shows that collegiality, even in expressing criticism or rejection, is an often invoked tool that leads to enforcing group norms and practices (Bechky, 2006; Hallier & James, 2000). In the arts, group norms such as collegiality can be taught in art school as would-be artists develop occupational networks and disciplinary techniques (Fine, 2017), but again, credentials are not required for pursuing a career in the creative industries. Outside of curricular artistic and arts-entrepreneurial training, there are a number of trade groups, unions, clubs, and other organizations that promote noncurricular career guidance, training, and information about specific genres of art and entertainment industries. More informally still, voluntary associations between artists create communities that come together to collaborate and engage in business as evidenced by many studies of the importance of collaborations, networks, and communities to artistic careers (e.g., Dowd & Pinhiero, 2013; Neff, Wissinger, & Zukin, 2005; Rossman, Esparza, & Bonacich, 2010; Townley, Beech, & McKinlay, 2009). Music industry community members in Nashville address their precarious employment situation through working together to promote and develop careers, organizations, and opportunities that promote and nurture the community as a whole (Cornfield, 2015). Songwriters, in and beyond the Nashville context, deal with uncertainty and competition in their occupation through cooperative strategies such as sharing the copyright in cowritten songs equally even if their actual contributions to a song were unequal (de Laat, 2015). Art is created in a complex ecosystem of informal and formal relationships between collaborators (Becker, 1984), so it should not be surprising that individuals working in an artistic labor market would rely on collective social strategies to mitigate the uncertainty and challenges posed by their line of work.

The Goffmanian line of theory around rejection is anchored in social psychology; as a consequence, it tends to excel at describing individuals’ responses to workplace and labor market rejection though it undertheorizes the structures that underlie employment relationships. The literature on artistic careers focuses on the structures that contribute to precarity but does not adequately explain how group members are socialized to understand uncertainty or failure as part of their labor market context if they do not learn it in art school. What is missing from this literature is examination of the structural processes rather than internal sensemaking, by which rejection and failure are socialized in artistic occupational communities where it is important for individuals to develop the collegiality, self-regulation, and codified behavior necessary for status acquisition and maintenance. In their introduction to the special issue on artistic careers in Work and Occupations, Lingo and Tepper (2013) call for “a robust theory of artistic identity that takes into account how artists become professionally socialized in a world where the definition of professional artist is murky and the locations of socialization are varied and diverse” (p. 352). The experience of labor market failure or having one’s work rejected is a regular occurrence in artistic labor markets, even for established and successful artists. For this reason, the arts provide a strong case for examining the structures that underlie rejection and labor market failure. To these points, this article seeks to contribute toward an understanding of how informal occupational communities socialize aspiring members to manage rejection and labor market failure.

Members of the Scene

The people at Song Club’s workshops fill three roles: Song Club employees facilitate the workshops, a guest publisher or “pro” guest speaker from the music industry provides the content for the workshops on a volunteer basis, and aspiring songwriter members of the club attend the workshops for professional development and opportunities to have their music heard by publishers, a benefit of their paid membership in Song Club. Employees at workshops are typically the same group of about five people who help with meetings; all of the employees who run the meetings are women, and the group is relatively age diverse, ranging from about 25 to 65. While the same Song Club employees run the workshops each week, a different publisher attends each workshop. The publishers and guest speakers who led the workshops during my observations were evenly split between men and women, and they ranged in age from about 35 to 55. Based on interactions between the organization employees and guest publishers, it was clear that some publishers were close friends with Song Club employees, while others were only acquaintances before the workshops.

Of club members, about one third attended the workshops regularly and were generally individuals who lived in or around Nashville. The other two thirds were made up of people who travel to Nashville for writers’ nights, Song Club workshops, and other meetings in an attempt to advance their career and of Nashville residents who do not regularly attend the workshops. The distinction of “in-town” and “out-of-town” aspirants is a common one in Nashville’s music community. In fact, a well-known performing venue for songwriters, the Bluebird Cafe, allows only in-town writers to perform at their open mic nights. Their rationale is that the songwriters who are more serious about pursuing a career will make the move to Middle Tennessee and should receive preferential treatment.

As is reflective of the Nashville country music industry, there is little visible racial or ethnic diversity among staff, guest publishers and speakers, or club members. All Song Club employees were White, as were all of the guest publishers and speakers, except for one publisher who identified herself as Native American. Among club members in my time at this organization, there were about five African-American individuals, one woman who self-identified as being of Asian descent, and only one person I met who self-identified as having Latino heritage in attendance. Song Club members hailed from a wide variety of locales. It was not uncommon for people from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia to be present in the group, and those from the United States came to Nashville from across the country. The group was typically split evenly between men and women who ranged in age from 16 to about 75.

Song Club’s Nashville chapter is mainly made up of aspiring country music songwriters and singer-songwriters. The group’s relative novice was explicitly pointed out in one of my early visits to Song Club when a publisher inquired about the group’s level of success in songwriting in terms of their number of cuts, the industry term for songs that have been licensed, recorded, and released by a performing artist. The publisher asked, “Has anyone here had a cut? A minor cut? A major cut?” One person told the publisher that he had an indie cut, and the publisher responded that every little cut counts. On a more cynical note, Dale, a middle-aged White male and frequent attendee of Song Club workshops, said quietly, “We wouldn’t be here if we had.” There is no rule at Song Club that would prohibit more established songwriters from attending, but the events were geared toward aspirants looking to get advice, connections, or a foothold in the songwriting community.

Analytic Strategy

I was in the field for 6 months and attended 15 club meetings—9 publishing workshops and 6 “learn from a pro” nights. During club meetings, ranging in duration from 2 to 5 hours, I took jottings in a field notebook and later expanded them into detailed field notes. Combined, these field notes create a 140 page typed, single-spaced record of my time in the field that I analyze for the purpose of this study. Nashville has the highest density of music industry workers of any city in the United States (Peoples, 2013), so this dense and dynamic labor market provides ample opportunity for studying aspiring songwriters and how they are socialized into their occupational community. Before entering the field, I attained permission to attend meetings as a researcher from Song Club’s president and from Renee, the middle-aged White Song Club employee who was in charge of facilitating the weekly meetings. In the field, I was overt about my status as a researcher and made it a point to reveal my purpose in the field to each person I met. In one of my last visits to Song Club, I assisted with the meeting in a small role (putting CDs into a boom box at the front of the room and announcing the songs’ titles and writers) and was introduced as a researcher more publically at that point.

To analyze data from 6 months of observations, I inductively coded my field notes using ATLAS.ti to identify themes related to professional socialization, failure, and rejection. After coding the field notes, themes emerged that brought together relevant codes into a cohesive picture of rejection at Song Club’s workshops. The strategy of nesting codes inside of larger themes is in line with Miles and Huberman’s (1994) method of grouping codes into broader themes to understand how small interactions influence larger processes. Recent calls for more empirical qualitative sociology that contributes rich, thick description toward the goal of understanding “puzzles” in our social world (Besbris & Khan, 2017; Mears, 138; 2017) suggest that sociologists should more often present descriptive empirical research that can then go on to contribute to theory-building in a particular area. The case of aspiring songwriters being socialized into dealing with rejection is one small, observable instance of failure in an informal labor market. Surely it does not represent the only ways in which rejection is learned in these kinds of work arrangements, but it can give a window into the larger understudied puzzle of labor market failure and how workers are socialized to deal with it. Now I ask, how does this occupational community socialize aspiring members to manage rejection and labor market failure?

Contextualizing Rejection and Failure as Normal

I arrived at Song Club’s office in Nashville, Tennessee at 4:30 on a January evening and was surprised to see about 10 aspiring songwriters already lined up outside on the building’s wraparound wooden porch, seemingly unaware that it was only 20 degrees outside and unfazed by the idea that they would have to wait outside until the workshop’s 5:30 p.m. start time. Forty-five minutes later, the 70 seats in the building’s workshop space were filled, and people began to stand in the hall and entryway of the building, waiting for a seat become available. The workshop began, and one by one, aspiring songwriters pitched their song by playing the first verse and chorus of their song for a well-known music publisher who either “kept” their song to give it a second listen or passed on it, either by saying “pass” or just shaking his head silently before the next party tune or love ballad began playing from the boom box at the front of the room. Writers who chose to leave after they presented their song would generally listen to a few more songs, quietly gather their things, pick up their CD and materials from the basket at the front of the room, and exit. Song Club member Anthony Lamb, a White man in his late 20s, was helping run the workshop that night by putting CDs in the boom box and announcing each song’s title and writer in the order they arrived to the workshop. He instructed others about what to do when they were ready to leave:

Anthony, holding up a basket filled with CDs: “By the way guys, if they don’t take your song then you can pick it up here.”

Male Audience Member: “The one that says finished?”

Anthony: “Yes. But it doesn’t mean your career is finished.”

The workshop atmosphere was generally lively and fun despite the number of individuals whose songs would be rejected in a given night. Renee facilitated the positive ambiance through sarcastic humor, mostly related to her consistent and obvious difficulty using the boom box to play songs, references to heavy drinking, and jokes that poked fun at the aspiring writers by suggesting that they might be dishonest about their place in a line or that they might want to bribe her to get a better chance at having their songs kept. At the same time that the main pitching session was going on, club members would engage in casual conversation when songs were not playing.

At times, tension would emerge and casual conversation would be diminished, making the auditory scene a dramatic series of up-tempo party songs and love ballads punctuated by expectant silence. One instance was particularly illustrative of the difference between the moments when the song was being pitched and the publisher’s reception of the song. Renee plucked the CD from the out-of-town basket and announced the title of the song, “Moonshine Measles.” The writer announced loudly, “That’s mine!” The track started to play. There were about 15 seconds of loud guitars, big drums, and a male lead vocalist excitedly yelping things such as “Whoo!” “Yeah!” “Let’s Party!” While the music played, the songwriter danced in his seat, bobbed his head, and was generally having a great time. The process of announcing the song, listening to the verse and chorus, and waiting for the publisher’s “pass” response took about 1 minute in all. The writer of this party anthem, like most other aspirants in the room, had spent time and money writing the song, recording the demo, and traveling to Nashville to pitch the song, and yet it only took 1 minute for his work to be rejected in front of dozens of his peers.

One might expect that the publisher’s quick indication that he passed on “Moonshine Measles” would be followed by some sort of reaction or response from the song’s writer, but in general, the Song Club workshops moved quickly, leaving little room for further conversation between an individual writer and the publisher. Many times after a song was played, my notes read, “No words (pass or keep) were spoken after the song,” and generally, the songs came one after another in quick succession without time for any conversation.

Most publishers at Song Club gave very little feedback to individual writers, regardless of whether they kept or passed on a song. Publishers committed to listening to the first verse and chorus of one song by each Song Club member, a process that typically took 3 to 4 hours. When a publisher kept a song, their feedback was uniformly positive and typically minimal and nonspecific (e.g., “this sounds like radio”; “it is really marketable”; “I like that”), but feedback surrounding rejection had more variation and specificity (e.g., “this is outdated”; “I can’t picture anyone doing this on radio”; “I wish there was a hook to bring it together”; “it needs a rewrite”; “the chorus is too short”; “it is not a good song”; “it could go in a movie trailer but not much else”; “the intro was too long; I was over here knitting”; “that’s a bad title”; “I’m not trying to pick on you, but you need to up your game”; “if I’m being honest, it’s just ok”). On one night, the publisher gave some initial insight into what a pass meant to him: “Pass doesn’t mean I don’t like your song. There’s a difference between a good song and the right song.” This type of feedback made it clear that publishers were looking for the “right” song for their business needs rather than just adjudicating between which songs were good or bad.

The manifest purpose of Song Club is “to educate and bring together the songwriting community,” though the setup of the workshops might on first glance appear primarily as an opportunity for career advancement rather than an education or community building event. Despite the event’s focus on getting one’s music into a publisher’s hands, most of the songs were immediately rejected. After my first visit to Song Club, I developed a system of shorthand that allowed me to efficiently track the songs that the songwriters pitched. In the following eight workshops, I tracked whether a song was “kept” or “passed” on by publishers. Songwriters pitched 403 songs, 327 of which were passed on by publishers. In total, 81% of all songs pitched during the 6 months I was in the field were rejected in person at the workshops. Table 1 shows this information in more detail.

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Table 1.

Song Club Weekly Rejection Rates.

Week	Songs pitched	Songs kept	Songs rejected	Rejection rate
1	53	11	42	79%
2	65	11	54	83%
3	32	15	17	53%
4	50	11	39	78%
5	67	11	56	84%
6	48	1	47	98%
7	28	6	22	79%
8	60	10	50	83%
Total	403	76	327	81%

Compared with the likelihood of getting a job in some industries, these numbers might look encouraging, but unlike the dichotomous employed/not employed status that potential employees must navigate, having a song kept only gets songwriters past the first potential location of labor market failure. Throughout the process of a song being scribbled on a napkin or digitally typed up in a notes app to being recorded and eventually released to commercial audiences, many layers of gatekeepers, artists, and corporate entities can potentially reject a song. One songwriter told me that you cannot assume that your song made it onto a record until you physically pick it up in Walmart (or see it on iTunes or Spotify, as the case may be in the current digital music economy). Even if a song has been recorded for an album, it may still be rejected from the album’s final song list, and even if a song is released to the public, it could be a commercial flop. A career in songwriting is not beholden to clearly delineated categories of success or failure; rather, it is a series of potential opportunities characterized by a high volume of rejection, even for established and successful writers.

Learning to Interact With Gatekeepers

Publishing houses and record labels rarely accept unsolicited songs from the public. In fact, the publishing house across the street from Song Club had a sign on the door that read, “NO SOLICITING. FRESH OUT OF RECORD DEALS & PUBLISHING DEALS.” Even for writers who had their songs kept by publishers at Song Club workshops, it is unlikely that they had further communication from the publishers afterward. In fact, it was regularly communicated to Song Club members that they should not expect any additional interaction with the publishers. For example, Song Club’s workshop leader, Renee, said to the group at the end of one night, “Just ‘cause they took your song doesn’t mean you can e-mail them.” During a workshop later in my time at Song Club, the publisher sat for a question and answer session before the workshop began, and the issue of contacting publishers came up:

Writer: What happens to a song after you keep it?

Publisher: It sits around for some period of time, and then I sit down with my wife—my business partner—and have a listening meeting.

Writer: Should we contact you if we don’t hear anything?

Publisher: No news is bad news.

On one occasion, Dale, a middle-aged male member of the club who regularly attended workshops, told me that a person he met at a workshop e-mailed the publisher after their song was kept. According to Dale, this aspiring writer was almost immediately cc’d on an e-mail from the publisher to Renee asking why a songwriter was e-mailing him directly. At a workshop soon after, I watched as Renee chastised the group because people had been contacting publishers outside of the workshop, which explicitly clarified norms around individual access to gatekeepers.

The bureaucratic processes that governed Song Club workshops played a key role in modeling appropriate relationships and interactions with industry gatekeepers. There was a clearly defined schedule of events that occurred each week, and Renee described it at the beginning of every meeting. One night, she turned to the audience and asked, “Who is here for the first time?” About 5 of the 20 or so people in the room raised their hands. Renee asked if they needed her to explain the schedule of events for the workshop. One middle-aged White man said that she might as well explain it even though he thought he knew how it worked. Renee obliged his request and described the pitching process. She emphasized that it would be up to the publisher to reach out to the writer of a kept song only if she wanted to. The publisher chimed in with a jokingly scolding tone, “Hopefully their information will be on their disk!” Renee said, sternly, “Yes, it should be.” Almost immediately, a man asked if he could put his information on his disk and apologized for not realizing that he was supposed to do that. Renee told him to go ahead and add his information. He got up, sifted through one of the baskets of CDs, and wrote down his information using a thick black marker.

The issue of writers having their song materials and clearly labeled with their information came up multiple times throughout my time at the weekly workshops. Members’ songs had to be presented on a CD in MP3 format with contact information and two copies of the song’s lyrics attached to the CD with a rubber band. This information was explicitly detailed on the club’s website. While introducing a song one evening, the publisher asked, “Joe, did you give me a lyric sheet—no—Good. I mean, not good, but I thought I lost them.” Joe was the only writer to miss this important piece of protocol. Although Joe was still allowed to pitch his song, some writers were not so lucky at other workshops. Numerous instances of technical difficulties related to writers improperly burning their songs onto a CD resulted in them not being able to pitch their songs. Song Club enables aspiring writers to make these sorts of mistakes in a setting that will not damage their reputation in the occupational community at large, though it could interfere with their song being presented in the workshop. The information that writers learned from either experiencing or seeing these errors lessens future likelihood of labor market failure for reasons over which they ultimately have control.

One night, the Song Club employee introduced a song’s title and stated the writer’s name and then asked, “This is also by Billy?” Billy had already pitched a song that night, and Renee stated that per Song Club rules, it was not permissible for a writer to submit more than one song per night. At that point, Billy’s wife spoke up and said, angrily, “Excuse me, ma’am. I spoke on the phone to [a Song Club employee] and he said it would be ok. I paid the membership fee. We had to do that since we traveled over 200 miles to be here.” The publisher looked at Renee and said it would be ok, so Renee acquiesced. The song in question was played, and the publisher passed on it. Renee deferred to the publisher, but the writer and his wife deviated from the social norms of deference and collegiality that permeate this occupation community. The organizational rules and norms that governed Song Club made the workshops run better, but they also reinforced norms that songwriters should expect from publishers and other gatekeepers in the music industry.

Responding to Gatekeepers

Even if one publisher rejected a writer’s song, it could be pitched again at a subsequent workshop to a different publisher. Sometimes, this strategy paid off, and a song that had been rejected the week before could strike the fancy of a different publisher. Other times, songwriters would use criticism from a publisher to rethink aspects of their songs or even their strategy around the song they chose to pitch at Song Club. On my second week in the field, I spoke with Brandy, a 30-year-old White woman who had lived in Nashville for 10 years while pursuing a career in music. At the first Song Club workshop, Brandy’s song was passed on, but she did not get extensive feedback from the publisher. At the next workshop, I talked with her about her song choice for that night. She said that she was not pitching the same song as before though maybe she should have so that she could hear more feedback on it from a different publisher. Then, she explained, with great comedic embellishment, how last time the publisher picked love song after love song, while her song was called “It’s a Murder Kind of Night.” She repeated, with a dramatic cadence, “Murder. Kind. Of. Night.” Brandy emphasized that the song’s cheeky references to violence were clearly not what the publisher was looking for.

Though the vast majority of interactions between writers and publishers after a pass was brief and cordial, some writers deviated from that norm and pushed back on the publisher’s decision. This kind of deviance never resulted in a favorable outcome in terms of having one’s song reconsidered and almost always ended up carrying a social penalty for the writer in terms of lowered reputation among other Song Club members. Dale did not usually say anything when his songs were rejected, but on one occasion, he responded to rejection in a way that deviated from community norms. After hearing Dale’s verse and chorus, the publisher passed on the song and asked, “So Dale, how long have you been writing?” “Twenty-five years,” he answered. The publisher then began to comment, “What I’m lacking here is . . . ” Dale, interrupting the publisher, sharply snapped back, “Apparently you’ve never met your hero and been disappointed.” The publisher was taken aback and asked him to repeat what he had said. After Dale curtly repeated his retort, she told him that he needs to start cowriting because, “it’s a numbers game. Think how few 100%-ers ² there are in the Top 40.” No one specifically discussed his behavior at that time, but his rude response was the topic of gossip among writers in the following week’s workshop.

On another occasion, a towering, bulky, middle-aged White man with a cowboy hat and conspicuous snakeskin cowboy boots presented the publisher with an up-tempo recording of himself singing a song about abolishing all laws and moving toward anarchy. The publisher passed on the song and asked him a series of questions:

Publisher: “Why is it called ‘Abolition’?”

Writer: “Cause we’re gonna abolish all the laws and be free.”

Publisher: “Seems like it would fit in a live bar.”

Writer: “Yeah, that’s where the money’s at.”

Personal Connections With Gatekeepers

One may assume that aspiring songwriters at Song Club would benefit from established associations with the occupational community, but surprisingly, this did not seem to be the case. During one workshop, Renee noted during a song’s introduction that its writer was a former Song Club intern. The former intern, a young White woman, greeted her with an enthusiastic, “What up!” Renee told the audience, “See where you can go from here? Back here.” The song’s verse and chorus played and the publisher quickly passed on the song. On another night, the publisher, a friend of the songwriter’s father, passed on the song. On still another occasion, a Song Club chapter president from another city presented a song to the publisher. It was also passed on. In each of these instances, the songwriter had a personal connection to industry gatekeepers that was publically recognized; however, their songs were rejected by the publisher.

One example of personal connections that was especially illustrative of the limited power of personal connections to influence which songs were kept occurred when one Song Club member, a White woman who appeared to be in her 40s, pitched her song to a publisher who she knew in college. The publisher remarked, “Julie! I love so much of your stuff. I just don’t know what to do with it!” The publisher cried as the song played through the boom box speakers, but still she passed on it. She emphatically responded to the writer. “Julie, this is the most country thing I’ve ever heard you sing. I like the idea; I just don’t know if you executed it well. Girl, just keep writing.” The publisher then directed her comments toward the audience, “We go back to college computer class. She works at [a local restaurant] . . . go there, tip her! Co-write with her!” These women had known each other for years and had pursued similar career paths, and yet the personal connection between the two was not enough to overcome the fact that the publisher does not see a market for Julie’s songs. In the time I was in the field, there was only one case in which the publisher kept a song pitched by someone he or she already knew. In that case, the song was a favorite that was pitched and kept many times at different publisher workshops. It appears that who one knows does not necessarily help aspiring writers lower the chances of rejection at Song Club.

Reducing the Likelihood of Rejection and Collectivizing Failure

While feedback was generally scant and nonspecific, there were times when the publisher or Renee would tell writers that they should incorporate cowriting into their career strategy. Many of the publishers’ suggestions to songwriters about cowriting served to suggest that the writer should strengthen a particular area of their songwriting. One publisher framed cowriting in terms of the positive benefits it could bring to a writer’s craft in structuring songs; “I really like where you’re trying to go, but the chorus went on forever. You really have a knack for this; you just need to co-write more.” Another publisher, after passing on a song, told its writer and another writer who pitched a song earlier in the night that they should collaborate to bring together their complimentary skills. This, the publisher said, would improve upon each of their weaknesses. Still another publisher specifically prescribed cowriting as the solution for a writer’s weak point, telling the aspirant, “Maybe co-write with a melody person,” and told another writer, “I think you need to get together with younger writers because everything about this sounds dated.”

Cowriting is the statistical norm for country songs and can benefit songwriters in terms strengthening the song itself as illustrated earlier, but cowriting also embeds a song into the social fabric of the occupational community. Although most successful country songs are cowritten, almost all songs pitched at Song Club were written by one songwriter, so it is not surprising that Song Club serves as a site of building an initial occupational social network for aspiring writers.

I was able to see the progression of one writer in particular as he transitioned through the suggestions and norms socialized by Song Club. During my first visit to the workshops, Ben Hueso, a White male writer in his late 20s presented an up-tempo song called “Under a Palm Tree with You.” After the publisher passed on the song, she told Ben, “I think you need a bigger chorus,” to which he answered, “The chorus is after that.” The publisher then gave him a look that conveyed pity and gestured with her hands that he needed to speed it up. Ben was deviating from the community norm by pushing back, but as it was also his first visit to Song Club, he was not yet aware of norms against replying to gatekeeper critiques. In future workshops, he did not push back against publishers’ decisions again. In a subsequent workshop, Ben’s pitch was kept, and Charles, a young African-American club member, remarked “nice!” Later in my time at Song Club, Charles would pitch a song that he and Ben cowrote, a collaboration that would not have occurred had they not met at Song Club. Importantly, because Charles pitched the cowritten song, Ben was able to pitch another song, effectively doubling his chances of having a song kept. Their song was kept by the publisher. This is the ideal scenario from Song Club’s point of view—Ben went from deviating from community norms, learning from the experience, returning to pitch more songs, and ultimately building connections with others at the club with whom he would go on to have some success.