Listen in on What You Can Learn From The Singing News – An Interview with the Writer and Founder of the magazine, Victoria Loudon: a blog about conducting interviews have with prominent members of the music industry.
Listen in on What You Can Learn From The Singing News – An Interview with the Writer and Founder of the magazine, Victoria Loudon: a blog about conducting interviews have with prominent members of the music industry.
Listen in on What You Can Learn From The Singing News – An Interview with the Writer and Founder of the magazine, Victoria Loudon: a blog about conducting interviews have with prominent members of the music industry.
Listen in on What You Can Learn From The Singing News – An Interview with the Writer and Founder of the magazine, Victoria Loudon: a blog about conducting interviews have with prominent members of the music industry.
Listen in on What You Can Learn From The Singing News – An Interview with the Writer and Founder of the magazine, Victoria Loudon: a blog about conducting interviews have with prominent members of the music industry.
What You Can Learn From The Singing News – An Interview with the Writer and Founder of the magazine, Victoria Loudon
Victoria Loudon is an award-winning freelance writer and editor. She worked as a features writer on the Financial Times and contributed to publications such as the Telegraph, Daily Mail, GQ and Esquire. She has also written biography, edited books and ghostwritten memoirs. Her first book, A Year in the Life of a Working Girl was published by Pan Macmillan in 2004.
What was your inspiration for starting The Singing News?
I had been living in New York City for many years when I moved back to London a few years ago. I missed it terribly and wanted to find some way of reconnecting with it whilst being based here. So when I took over from my predecessor at The Singing News, one of my first ideas was to start doing interviews with artists who have come through the New York music scene. I was always struck by how diverse their backgrounds were when I visited there so wanted to explore those stories further.
How long have you been running The Singing News?
Two years now but this month marks our third anniversary!
Singers and the songwriters they interpret have the ability to be a surprise to their audience, but many of them have come on board this musical journey with a clear understanding of what they want to offer. The process of getting signed and recorded is not a simple one and can take years, but it is worth the journey for some.
The Singing News is an inspirational magazine that helps aspiring singers and songwriters stay motivated. This blog about conducting interviews has a chat with its founder, Victoria Loudon:
“It’s just a great opportunity for anyone who wants to learn how to sing.”
Victoria Loudon is the writer and founder of The Singing News, a magazine for Christian country music fans.
“There was no model for what I wanted to do,” says Victoria, who started the magazine in 1969. “The only other music magazine at the time was Billboard, which focused on pop music. There was nothing for fans of southern gospel and country music.”
For its first four years, The Singing News struggled along with a small circulation of 6,000 readers. But it began to grow when Victoria left her job as a journalist to devote herself full-time to the magazine. A year later it had a circulation of 20,000 and today The Singing News goes out to 75,000 subscribers and has become one of the most profitable magazines in the US.
What’s striking about Victoria’s story is not just how she built The Singing News into a success but how she did it in an industry where most people have little or no business experience. In fact, many musicians don’t even know how to read music or play an instrument when they start out. Yet Victoria turned her love of music into a multimillion-dollar company without any formal business training or previous experience in publishing.
Victoria Loudon: I think the main thing that has impressed me about the busker scene is how many great songwriters and singers there are, and yet how hard it is for them to take that next step to getting signed.
The story of a big record deal is one that seems to crop up a lot when people are talking about busking. In fact, The Singing News was originally started as an entertainment magazine, which was sold on the street in London, to buskers by buskers. It seemed like a good idea at the time – I read loads of magazines while I was out singing and figured other people would too. It didn’t really work out though – we struggled to get enough articles to fill the magazine each time, so after a while we turned it into a listings magazine instead.
So what do you think makes it difficult for singers and songwriters to take that next step? What do they need to do differently?
There’s always room for improvement in every singer’s performance – whether it’s through better stagecraft, more confidence or better songs. But that might not be the only problem – maybe it’s about finding the right person who will listen. If you’re busking on a street corner somewhere, then you’re unlikely to be
The Singing News is an American monthly journal of Southern Gospel music. The publication was founded in 1971 and is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.[1]
The Singing News Magazine, a monthly publication that features articles about the Southern Gospel industry, has a circulation of over 110,000 people and is the largest printed magazine devoted to this genre of music. In addition to the magazine, The Singing News hosts an annual convention each year known as the “Singing News Fan Awards”, which also includes a large southern gospel concert event.
The magazine currently publishes an issue each month from February through December.
I have had some wonderful encounters with the people I have interviewed. For instance I once interviewed a singer called Victoria Williams, who is a singer songwriter from America. She is a very beautiful person, and really charming and lovely to talk to. At the end of the interview she said to me, “I’m so sorry that I didn’t get to ask you any questions, do you want to ask me some?” So I asked her about how she got started in music and she said that she was busking on the streets of New Orleans, when one day a guy driving by stopped his car and said, “You have an incredible voice, what are you doing?” She told him that she was a singer and he asked if he could give her his card. She said yes and then forgot about it and just carried on busking. Some time later she found the card again and decided to call him. It turned out that he was Jackson Browne’s manager! Jackson liked her songs so much that he invited her on tour with him. He also recorded a whole album of her songs on which many famous singers performed, like Tom Petty, Pearl Jam, Suzanne Vega etc., which became known as “Sweet Relief