A conversation with Dallas Jackson who is the editor-in-chief of quintessential music magazine American Songwriter.
The magazine was purchased in 2019 and has gone through quite a few editorial changes over the last year. In our conversation, we discuss some of those changes, the magazine’s new podcast network, how analytics have moved front and center, and Dallas gives us the lowdown on what he is looking for in a pitch which, we were surprised by…
TRANSCRIPT
Rachel Hurley 0:00
Hello everyone, I’m Rachel Hurley and this week on Music Rookie is a conversation with Dallas Jackson, who’s the editor in chief of quintessential music magazine, American Songwriter. The magazine was recently purchased and has gone through quite a few editorial changes over the last year. So in our conversation, we discuss some of those changes, the magazine’s new podcast network, and how analytics are now front and center, and we discussed what Dallas looks for in a pitch. And, let me tell you, I was surprised by the answer. So let’s jump right in.
Rachel Hurley 0:42
Let’s just start at the beginning because I know that you recently took over the position at American Songwriter and they changed ownership and all that, so do you want to start telling me your background and how you came to be at American songwriter?
Dallas Jackson 0:55
I came to be at American Songwriter because I had a working relationship with the owner, Sam Savage, for about five years. He and I both met at a joint venture we were a part of called Comicbook.com and popculture.com, he was the CEO of those two companies. I was brought in by another partner and mutual colleague named Shannon Terry. I worked with Sam for a handful of years, and when we sold to CBS, he and I stayed close, and then when he told me that he’d purchased American Songwriter from Albion and that crew, he asked if I was interested in coming on to run editorial with him. I kind of followed him based on a past working relationship that he and I had.
Rachel Hurley 1:31
Do you have a background in music?
Dallas Jackson 1:33
That depends on what you mean by background in music. I played in bands in high school and college, but as far as my career in journalism, no. And as far as my managerial career at popculture.com, we launched a country vertical, and so we did a lot of things with country music, and it was very country music specific at that time, and we did that 2 years before we sold to CBS. Traditional music coverage, no. I guess that’s the shortest answer.
Rachel Hurley 2:01
So since you’ve taken over, what is your vision? What are the things that you wanted to change? What are the things you’re working on changing, obviously it’s a weird time for music journalism, and across the board because so many people have been laid off and everybody’s cutting back on staff,and you guys seem to be going full force ahead. Give me the lowdown.
Dallas Jackson 2:22
Sure, so the first thing we did when we got in was to look at the lay of the land. We did some phone calls and tried to understand what people thought of us, what people thought of American Songwriter. Sam and I have been blessed in our careers and both of us have done a lot of startups, so we never really had a brand to work with. American Songwriter has had such a rich history in the music space that we had a unique opportunity where it was this brand, but it didn’t really have a lot of substance to it, in our opinion.
We started doing the analytics and looking at what people said and thought about it. So, the first thing we really did was start building new relationships. We started reaching out to more PR people. We had a vision and a goal to become more genre agnostic. We’ve noticed more in the past decade or so that American Songwriter kind of painted themselves into a corner of the Americana space, and they didn’t really branch out into too many other things. While that was good to have that niche and kind of have those things on lock, it also limited who wanted to work with us. So the first thing we needed to do is make sure we have more people that wanted to work with us. We made that a mission statement.
In the January issue, my first issue, there was a letter to the editor explaining exactly what we were gonna do with four key points. I used quotes from Lucille Ball to extrapolate them to people. Then we followed it up with our second thing where, it was the March issue, we laid out “hey, this is the reception. It’s been positive results we’re getting, this is our goal, these are the things that we want to do.” My part and parcel and that was to say yes to more things, and so you mentioned a lot of folks downsizing and covering less than having less staffing, and we saw the opportunity to do the exact opposite even in the face of Covid. We staffed up, we said yes to more premieres and said yes to more features, and that kind of goes back to that first part of, we had to build relationships. And covering music and covering stories is part and parcel for us.
The vision I guess is to continue that. You know, that’s the final part of your question was what’s our vision for the future. We have no interest in being another Billboard or being another Rolling Stone. Those two places exist, they’re fantastic, they do what they do, and us to be a third in that pecking order, for wherever you guys, the pantheon of people, see us, we’re not interested in competing with them. You know, that brand of American songwriter and telling the stories of how songs are written is something that is true to us. That’s something to stay true to and it’s so easy to get into those discussions. We’ve been covering more metal bands, more rock bands and Christian acts, and all these other things because every song you hear is written. Our pitch to a lot of these folks is that you can do an interview with whomever or whatever magazine and you might have done that same interview 15 times, but how many metal bands get to talk about the process behind their songwriting and how many hip-hop artists get to talk about the process behind their songwriting. It’s been really well-received and that’s kind of where we wanna stay. We’re gonna stay in our lane, but we’re wanna grow it.
Rachel Hurley 5:19
Just as a caveat I will mention that you are the only editor that’s ever written me back asked how I was, and I think I told you that in the email I was like “what?” That was nice.
Dallas Jackson 5:31
Well we’ve done a number of startups and I’ve been in publishing and online publishing for 20 years, so relationships are always important. Whether it’s somebody I just met, like yourself, or people that we’ve worked with for a few months really, you still could check in on people. They’re more than just an inbox and they’re more than just a business transaction. And in this COVID time, it is crazier than most, so checking in on people is important.
Rachel Hurley 5:57
You bring up an interesting issue in saying that you worked at startups before. I’ve also worked at a few startups before. I went through an accelerator program called Seed Hatchery and did two start ups, and so that’s kind of like a newer way of thinking about things versus the old school journalism way of thinking about things. What are the new ideas that you have been able to implement at American Songwriter from your startup background?
Dallas Jackson 6:27
I think what we learned from the iterations that we’ve had, and I’ve been very blessed to have worked with some very, very smart people, way smarter than me. And I’ve taken a lot of their ideas, and one of the biggest things is blending the knowledge that you have. You know that gut feeling like “hey this is going to be good” that’s fine and all well and good to go on, but if there’s not data to support that over the long haul, you’re going to miss more than you hit, no matter what your experience is.
One of the things that I think myself and Sam as well brought into this is that appreciation for data. We make a lot of our decisions based on that and we asked our users, and we take that user data to adjust as we go. You know there was a trend in online media a handful of years ago, I’m sure no surprise to you that people were transitioning so hard to video that everything had to be a video, or a video premiere, or a video this. We started noticing that even as we increased our video, it never grew at the same rate as everything else. So the more features we did or the more songwriting tips that we did or the interviews with songwriters that we did, those are growing at 400%. Those are growing exponentially, where video was still staying on that stagnant line of where it was.
So we reached out to our users and we just said “what are things you’re interested in?” and video was literally dead last, and we were like “well of course it’s not growing, none of our readers care about that.” Then we asked why they didn’t care about that. Traditionally, they’re songwriters. They’re not interested in that visual element. So doing something that would’ve been a pivot to video, if you follow internet trends it would make sense, but for us we would’ve totally crushed us. So you look at those things and you ask why and we ask for feedback. We’re not afraid to be wrong and then adjust to it. There’s nobody going to stick to a bad plan.
Rachel Hurley 8:13
Yeah. I mean,I think that there has been a miscalculation by many people on the pivot to video because I don’t think I’ve taken into account that more and more people are reading everything on their phone, and they’re scrolling, and they just want more bits and pieces. They might be on the bus or out in public, and they’re not going to click on that video and be able to listen to it. That happens in our newsletter a lot, you know they’re reading the content but they’re not necessarily clicking through to the video content as much as we expected them to.
Dallas Jackson 8:47
Yeah, it’s literally the exact same thing. We’re like “man everyone’s doing this push on video” and it was not scaling. So we did all that same analytics stuff and it worked. We’re still scaling crazy high, and the numbers are continuing to grow.
Rachel Hurley 9:04
I’ve kept up with your Alexa ranking, and it’s jumped way high.
Dallas Jackson 9:07
Well I hope to keep that trend going, that’s for sure.
Rachel Hurley 9:09
That brings up the whole analytics thing, it’s something that I’ve always wondered, and I’ve just expect to be true, but maybe I’m not, maybe it’s not true, but what I tell my clients is that when you get a premiere or an interview at an outlet, you really need to push that towards all of your fanbase and get as many people as possible to go check that out. Because you guys are probably looking at the analytics of those features and determining whether or not you’re going to cover that person again. Maybe if you get a premiere, are you going to do a review? Well let’s see how many people who looked at and read the premiere.
Dallas Jackson 9:46
You’re literally 100% correct.
Rachel Hurley 9:48
I love to hear that.
Dallas Jackson 9:50
No, we do. We do exactly that. People have a little bit of a misnomer as well, and we don’t just look at a baseline of how many Facebook fans they have, Instagram fans, whatever. We’ve covered people with literally eight fans on Facebook because we thought the song was a really good song. And we’ve covered people with millions, tens of millions of fans all around, but we still have to do those weights and measures. So if we put out something and it does well, well then sure, we’re going to go to the well again and see what the next thing is. The hard part with video specifically is so many acts and so many talents will want to just share that video direct on all of their platforms. Don’t share the URL from the source that says you get that premiere with us. You get a premiere with us and it’s a video premiere, which is kind of hit-or-miss with our audience anyway, and then you go and just drop the video link straight onto your social media feed without my link and it goes nowhere. It’s kind of a dead loop, so then we go and measure that analytic back and we’re just like like “man, that band didn’t support the premiere,” or their fans, whatever the reason is, it just makes it harder to say yes on that next one.
Rachel Hurley 11:00
Do you have a ratio of how much you’re spending on editorial time versus how much you’re spending looking at analytics and numbers engaging? Stuff like, “this is working, we need to do more of this stuff.” Or, “This is not working, let’s move on from that” because I imagine this year you’re doing what they say in startups is to sell fast.
Dallas Jackson 11:21
What’s really a nice answer here for us is we have a lot of eyeballs on analytics and so that doesn’t just put the pressure straight onto to me, to manage that time. I know what I don’t know and I like to surround myself with people that can fill in those gaps, so I give a lot of credit to the people that also work with us. So I actually get to spend my day reading the pitches and listening to SoundCloud and deciding if it’s a good tune.
Rachel Hurley 11:46
So that brings me back to, can you talk about how important it is for you to get pitched a good story angle along with a good song? Obviously this whole thing’s only listened to by a musician, so we’re trying to give them feedback and get information, and that’s something that I sometimes have trouble getting through to clients – you can write a great song, but a great song with a great story goes even further. Obviously if I’m pitching you, I need to be able to entice you to listen to that song by telling a great story about it.
Dallas Jackson 12:22
You know, let me think about that cause I don’t want to give bad advice. Again, this is specific to me and Songwriter, and I’m definitely a different style of editor. I tend to say yes to more things, but I also, again specific to Songwriter, so other editors might have a very different answer for this. I don’t have a lot of time to read that good story pitch; I would much rather be able to get into the meat of, “Is this a good tune?” because then our people are interested with the tune, is the writing behind it, and not just “Can I hear it?” or this good story. You can have a great story but a bad tune, and it’s not going to work for us. So specific to Songwriter, I would say get the tune higher up in your pitch and probably save your efforts on writing a long pitch. And I tell my writers that too. I don’t want long pitches.
Rachel Hurley 13:12
Well that’s great information but let me ask you this: are you just going through and listening to every song that’s sent to you?
Dallas Jackson 13:19
I try my best to. To be honest, I’m literally up in my office, I have my headphones on almost all day. I’ll see a pitch, if it’s a band that I know and and like and I know their story and things like that and it’s “Hey we have a new tune,” or a new album or whatever to cover, that’s a little easier to yes/no. If it’s a band that I have never heard of, I’ll listen to it or if it’s a genre that I don’t particularly like, I will send it to writers that do like that genre because I don’t want my personal tastes to influence what’s up on the side of what goes in a our print product. So we have a team of people that have specific faith-based writers, specific metal writers, hip-hop writers, specific bedroom pop writers, whatever they are. So if I get a pitch and in a genre that I don’t particularly like, I’ll send it out to those other writers and say “Hey is this something that you guys enjoy? Is this something the fanbase there would like?” It’s certainly not just me making the decisions. I really empower our writers to make those decisions too.
Rachel Hurley 14:13
How many writers do you have currently?
Dallas Jackson 14:16
32, I think is what we’re at now. We’re always looking for more, we’re always building pitches from freelancers, we’re always adding people to our staff. You can’t tell as many stories as you possibly can without having writers to do it.
Rachel Hurley 14:32
Can you talk about any new features or new columns that you’re working on or excited to start?
Dallas Jackson 14:39
One thing we’re very excited about is our launch of a podcast network, the American Songwriter podcast network, which now has 14 podcasts. We just brought Robert Earl Keen’s over to us, and we have a handful of really really good ones. That’s a new initiative we’re ramping up. We also partnered with a couple of other academics, I guess is maybe the word, or trained professionals to kind of give more of the breakdown of songwriting. We got so much replies from our users for us to have actual instruction, actual breakdowns of “how do you go about writing songs?” like more true core stuff. We’ve added that. That’s going to be print and online features. We gotten a lot of folks in a vast to expand from songwriting in terms of words to be more music inclined, and so we’ve added a couple of guitar experts. They’re going to do some guitar 101 kind of things to teach people how to do different chord progressions in different ways. If you’re used to playing one specific way, if you drop it to a different note, they can make your whole sound different. We try to go more to our core and again, not try to compete with the Billboards of the world because that’s a different space that we don’t always have to splash in.
Rachel Hurley 15:52
How do you determine what goes into the print magazine versus what is just a digital feature?
Dallas Jackson 15:59
So for print, we usually have a pretty simple format. We want to have our cover story that is usually just determined by relationships, pitches, what music is coming up. We also are trying to line up, this is actually pretty neat, we’re trying to line up more special issues. So in January every year is our legends issue, which this year we have Bob Marley and the estate on the cover, there’s gonna be exclusive images never-before-seen. So that’s pretty easy. If a PR person comes to me and says “Hey the Bob Marley estate, it’s the 40th anniversary of his death, and we have exclusive photos, we would love to work with you guys,” well that’s an easy yes. And then from there we kind of target people we want to be in it, or different genres. So again, specific to legends, with so much of our past 10 years being Americana, so much of those past ten legends issues have been Americana. So this year we wanted to open that up, so we got more genres and we got more historical on it. We have some people that are legends, might be a different word for it, but a modern legend, we have Lady Gaga in this issue along with Bob Marley. And that’s somebody who would never have been in American Songwriter in the past 10 years. We had Chuck D, a hip hop icon from the eighties and nineties. We go and target specific things that we want to increase.
Now for our more traditional issues, it’s kind of that same thing. We want something that’s timely. We obviously don’t want to be putting somebody on the cover if the last album was 6 months ago and they have nothing to talk about. So we want some relevance and then that cover also is going to have four or five other names that are going to be name pegs. So they’re also based in terms of relevance and what they’re doing, but they’re not determined based on size. Billy Strings was on our last cover pic his audience is still relatively small. He’s going to become the future Bluegrass and everybody loves him, but on that same cover pic was Garth Brooks, and Seether was on the cover page. It’s just trying to become a collective. Also inside each issue, we have one page portraits where we look specifically to try to find lesser-known talents to give them a platform. So we had people again, literally there was a girl, think it was last issue, her name was Gail and she had 16 followers on Facebook but we heard her tunes and they thought they were really great and we thought she was somebody that could go and do something and so there’s not a minimum height requirement to be to be on our pages. Ee want to showcase people that are songwriting and doing really cool things
Rachel Hurley 18:20
So how are the magazine sales going? That’s the kind of the trick of this trade, right? It’s hard to get people to buy paper magazines now.
Dallas Jackson 18:32
We’ve actually been blessed. So in the in the past before I got here with the previous 34 years they maintained a very good subscription base and they maintain a pretty good news stand rate with lot of the partnerships, but then during this year with an increase in genres and our increase in what we’re saying yes to or what we’re putting out there, we’ve actually seen a substantial growth. Our last issue was the 35th anniversary issue. It was one of our biggest issues, it was one of our highest selling issues, and it was by far the most profitable issue. And, again, in a world where a lot of people can’t say those things, we’re actually in a very well positioned spot right now is to continue to grow and continue to add more.
Rachel Hurley 19:11
Well, it sounds like everything’s going really well for you. Are there any obstacles that you’re still trying to overcome?
Dallas Jackson 19:18
Yeah. I mean, every place probably has similar obstacles. You know, there’s a lot of business online that is still dictated by things outside of your control. Whether it’s bands or PR people getting behind the stories that they pitch, it could be, you know, an algorithm shift on Facebook, it can be where you place on Google this month, there’s a lot of things that are out of your control that they can put some swings into your into your best-laid plans. As far as other things that we can control, I really don’t want this to sound like being braggadocious or anything, but we really have done a lot of relationship building and that’s paying dividends. The things that we have done fundamentally to improve the standing of the business and the standing of the brand have gone a long way towards bolstering our success, I think. That’s as simple as just replying to every email. I mean we got told through our initial process once we acquired this site that American Songwriter was notorious for never even replying to emails. So if you would have told me that I would have been like, “Yep, we’ve heard that a thousand times.” So simply being active and being nice and cordial, and you, know those things have gone a long way towards helping us continue to grow. It sounds like a success story because through a year, it really has been.
Rachel Hurley 20:34
Yeah, I think that that’s one of the main issues that I have as a publicist is that I don’t even care if you say no, but it’d be great if you told me no. Cause then I can like I can check it off my list and I can move on, but when you know you have a client going “but what about this?” and I’m like, “Well, they haven’t answered yet, so it’s not a no, but it’s not a yes,” You know?
Dallas Jackson 20:56
Yeah, and listen, I say the same thing. It sounds cliche, and I have a handful of cliches, and I mean every single one of them. A no is the second best answer I can get. You can say yes or no, but at least answer me. You know, we do the same thing. Like, on my side I do the same thing as a publicist. You know, you guys reach out cause you want coverage. Well, there’s also people that I want. You know, I can’t tell you I can’t tell you how many times this year Bruce Springsteen has said no. I can’t tell you how many times he’s, you know, you reach out and say “Hey I know he has a new album coming,” he’s literally never been on the cover of American Songwriter. He’s a white whale. We hadn’t met Garth Brooks for 28 years. So, for the anniversary issue we were like “Hey, we haven’t had him in so long. We want this.” And in the end they said yes to this one, but they’re said no for the previous 28 years. So getting told yes or no is totally, tell me no because I don’t care. From my perspective, that’s one of those easy things for me because I’ll mow through this and go through my emails. If it goes to my spam box, that gets a little deep, but if it hits my inbox I’m gonna reply to you.
Rachel Hurley 21:59
Okay, well, I think I’ve taken up plenty of your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. I really wanted to get the lowdown on all the new stuff going on at American Songwriter. It really has become another one of our respected outlets that people want now because it is covering so much more stuff and I think it does give people kind of a social proof so to speak when they end up in American Songwriter, they feel like they’ve, you know, shown that they’re good.
Dallas Jackson 22:31
That was actually one of the biggest things coming into it. We always had that cache of, if they cover you it’s for a reason. So, that was always nice that there wasn’t this like, “oh they’ll say yes to everybody who cares,” kind of thing. So to be able to build on that and continue to have that reputation was like, you know if we put you in a magazine with Shane Mcanally, Larkin Poe and Garth Brooks on the cover, you’ve done something pretty darn well. You earned a stripe there. We’ve heard those success stories. There’s bands that we’ve fallen in love with that have hardly any following that we’re just like “This is awesome.” And they come back later like “Thank you so much for acknowledging us, thank you so much for putting your brand behind us.” So again, it’s unique for me usually coming from a start-up to already have a full force behind it. And it’s really great to see and feel the reception coming back that other direction where people are saying “Hey, we want American Songwriter” versus the opposite where it’s like “They’re never gonna answer that email anyway.”
Rachel Hurley 23:34
You’ve been great to work with so I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Dallas Jackson 23:39
Thank you so much for taking a half hour of your day, and have a good one.
Rachel Hurley 23:44
Of course, I’ll be in touch.
Rachel Hurley 23:47
And there you have it. Thanks to Dallas for taking the time to chat with me and giving us a look into American Songwriter’s editorial process. To sum it up, they’re making a lot of changes in who they cover – which opens the doors to a lot more musicians. They also started a new podcast network and are planning to expand coverage focusing more on musicianship. And if you want to pitch him, feel free to get right to the point. Drop that song link, and be sure to talk more about the process more than your story.
Thanks for listening, if you’re interested in more insider information just like this, be sure to check out our weekly newsletter. You can sign up on sweetheartpub.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast to be notified when the next one comes out. If you have a specific question, feel free to tweet me, or shoot me an email- I am not hard to find.
The music in this episode was created by Frank Keith of Great Peacock, and big thanks to Brandon Kinder for producing this episode. Now, go do something useful.
