The Realest Conversation About Songwriting In 2026 | Gino The Ghost | Patreon Exclusive

Have you had to learn to be fearless or is it something that comes natural? No, I've always, I've had to learn how to narrow my focus of fearless. Does that make sense? Yeah. I was, I think, coming up. I mean, I was an actor and a rapper. That's all I got to LA. And then I was just broke as fuck. And then I was just trying to figure it out for a while. I stumbled in the songwriting. My old manager and good friend of mine, Adam Small, got me to songwriting. And in that time, I was trying to scratch the itch of being an actor and the itch of being just a funny outgoing guy. And I was always like going viral on the internet, but I didn't know how to like narrow it in. And then the podcast was kind of a way to retain and build a platform. As I'm sure you know, you're like, I have all these people and I know all these people and I'm so good at talking about it and how do I build a platform on what I already do pretty naturally, right? And so, when did you start the podcast? Two and a half years ago. Yeah. Just about, yeah, my episode one, 48. What do you on? Two, 50 or something like that. I mean, you know, it's, we were almost 10 years. And we've now gone into the sort of weekly thing. But when we started this, it was, you know, the first 200 episodes are audio. And we resisted doing video, not because we weren't even, we were even filming some of it, but we weren't editing it. We weren't putting it out. I think if there was any resistance to it, it was that we had a good thing going. And we were part of the podcast generation of like the, it feels like the first second round of it. Yeah. You know, I mean, what did you say about 10 years ago? Like there weren't, there were, they're just in the songwriting world, there was zero. And there were in the music world, there were a few. But, you know, we were, it was, it was more just a document and archive generations of songwriters than it was about building a platform. Totally. Once as it's gone on, and especially once we went to video, you realized the support that that it's had. And more importantly, just how robust our community really is. That's the thing for me is it has allowed me to, to build a community like video. Like, you know, I have a, I have a long form every week. I put it a full episode every Monday. But I've found today that most, and this is something we can talk about with music. Most people are looking for the snackable bites. And they all come for the clips. And I cannot tell you how many comments I get, because I'll post a clip every day from the week, episode. And I'll get a comment at least one to two every day that's like, dude, you got to start a podcast. Yeah, right. I'm like, this is the podcast. What do you think is the podcast? Yeah. This is, you're watching it. So they'll treat the clips like the podcast. Do you find that you have to create, you start creating content knowing what's more clickable than others? Yeah. Well, I segment out my whole show. So I have everything segmented in the mind of this will be a clip. This will be a clip. This will be a clip. And I, I definitely will catch myself. It dude, the parallels with music are crazy, because it's like, we come from the album era. And people want singles. And so you, you then have to approach your album every week with the singles in mind. And I will have to literally like, segment it out. This is going to be a viral clip. So I have to hit these notes. And if I am doing it, and I like catch myself not hitting it, how I got to hit it, because I'm an actor, I will, I'll like find a way to recite it again in a way that's like, you know, we come from the album era. And so when you approach an album every week, you know, you got it. And I'll do it like that, you know. And so, yeah. Do you like doing the podcast? I love it. It's my favorite thing. Why are you in sessions? Because I love that too. And I want to do both those. You can do both. I can do both. I don't, like weekdays are music. Monday through Friday, I don't touch the podcast, other than editing a clip at night. I don't even do anything. Do you have time to do anything outside of these things? It seems like that's a lot of work. How do you do that? You want to go through my schedule? Basically, wake up in the morning, work out as you can see. And then I, I have Spanish like twice a week. I was, why are you taking Spanish? Because I write a lot in Latin music. And I just want to learn a language. It's tight. Are you learning is cool, guys? Are you, how fluent are you now? I think I'm a professor in Ecuador and I'm a class of two or three days per semana in a computer. That's fine. We got work to do. But so, yeah. And then I'll have a session like, it's probably like three to four times a week. I've been more selective now. What are sessions like in 2026? Oh, man. I only do stuff that I'm having fun doing. I will not do a session. That's like, so I have fun everywhere. How are you doing five sessions a week if you're only doing ones that are fun? Is it because you just enjoy your days or you? I'm hoping maybe. Yeah. I get to be selective. So what are your sessions like? What are you doing? I, if I'm doing pitch, you're doing pitch sounds. Yeah. And if I'm doing pitch, it's with friends. I will not do blind day pitch. I won't do it. If I'm doing. Who's cutting pitch sounds? He's this only K-pop. Pretty much like 90% K-pop artists. It's one of the things that we talk a lot with the Grammys is how important it is to move or to make sure that the Grammys represent Asia as well. It's done a really good job at working with Leras and Latin music. But the amount of even from the perspective of being based in the United States, the amount of American writers that are solely making a living off of Asian music. The Grammys has not caught up yet because I don't think that everybody realizes that and I don't mean like the the committees and the boards you're on. But the actual like the community and the awards and the fans of the Grammys and the people that watch the Grammys and really honestly the entire music community has not caught on that writers and producers are doing 75% K-pop. It's the only thing that pays right now. They're the only people accepting pitch really. All these other like huge artists, I mean I would love to work on that, do a album. I would love to sit down with my dear friend Ed Sheeran, you know, your friends of the pod and work on that album. But they're just not taking records like that like they used to and all the camps are super tape McCray and Sabrina and they're all just working with this fucking death and all the fucking Ryan Tedder's got out. He's got him on a chokehold right now. You know, and Amy Allen and John Belian. But this is what this is to give an idea of what pitch records used to be. The words ANR stand for artists in repertoire. You'd have somebody who would sign an artist and they would find the repertoire. You know, the greatest ANR guy of all time, Clive Davis would go and take a Barry Manolo who was the Justin Bieber of his era. And Barry's a very good songwriter might even be in the Hall of Fame. He's been an icon at BMI Awards and his biggest songs were not written by him. You know, he would do 10 of the 12 songs on his album and the last 12, the deal was he would at least, you know, Clive negotiated that he would get to pick the outside songs. And outside songs are written by professional songwriters where that's essentially all they do. And there was this when, you know, in many ways when I was first coming up, there was still the vestige way of being a professional songwriter as your own as your main vocation. You didn't have to subsidize it by also releasing music or podcasts or publishing companies or record companies or whatever was. You could make a living just by being a songwriter because there were so many avenues for people to take outside songs, especially when there was, you know, American Idol where that when the judge is born as famous or more famous than the singers, same thing with the voice, you know, these were X-Factor. These are all vehicles for songs to just move in English. And now it's like so many of those things have dried up that even when you win those shows, you know, these poor singers who think that they're going to win and get a record deal, like that's something you can do as spot on. But these poor souls, like, they can't, they don't even get record deals when they win. They get an option that nobody picks up. And then it's like, then they're stuck being a former winner that didn't work. They're like, hey, great. Congrats on winning. You do now need to go viral though. Yeah, yeah, right. And then we'll give you a deal. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. It doesn't, but there is no day. Correct. So it's like, if, you know, American Idol had 19 entertainment, which may or may not be there anymore, I don't know who's doing the American Idol deals. But, you know, the voice has no, there's no record company attached to the voice right now. Yeah, you know, each, each winner has to bring their winners to a to shop them around. Yeah, to try to get them a deal. But the point point is that those were all vehicles for outside songs and as those have dried up, everyone's looking for who will take outside songs and, you know, one is any record label that can find the singers who want to take outside songs will probably end up with albums of phenomenal songs. Any any it's it's so crazy that all artists feel like they need to also write their songs. Because Ross. Yeah. I like to call me by my name. You like that. They're not great. You're the only person I think who calls me like that. Yeah. I mean, they're not they're not great being what who's they're not great writers. A lot of them artists. Oh, some of them are of course because they're on tour. They're doing other things and they haven't written fucking three thousand songs in four years. They had it's it is a there are the best writers I've ever worked with the best artists I've ever worked with work with writers. Why would you not? Why would you not want to collaborate with people that their livelihood depends on creating hit records. I understand and respect the artists who says, you know, I want to write 100% of my songs or I write it with these people because that's what they want to do. And some. Some of them may or may some of them may or may not be hit writers. I don't know. And some of them are are known as, you know, in a way writers first. But the the kinds of what it does. What this era has done the last 20 years. And I think there are specific artists who really enabled this practice. But the idea of taking songwriting credit, even when they don't write the song. Give me fucking started, please. No, that's why you're here. I literally want to get you started on this. There are a lot of artists who take credit on songs that they didn't write. And and you know, how do you combat that? How bad do you want the record? Because that's really it. I won't say who recently a big artist, a friend of mine had it as a song with the big artist. And she wanted even splits on the record. The artist was like, I want even splits on the record. And everybody was like, okay. And she was like, nah, fuck that. Buy it out. Buy me out. Give me 15k for the publishing because you're reducing my publishing. Yeah, did you give me 15k. Yeah. And none of the other artists got paid, but she did. So you have to ask a B. Yeah, it depends like the hill you're willing to die on. If I do a song of Beyonce, Beyonce didn't work on it. And they're like, Beyonce's taking the cut of this. Yeah. Or it's not coming out. I'm going to probably roll over like a dog. But if it's an artist where I feel like I have leverage or I don't give, I don't care. Because again, you just don't make you have to decide where when you want to stand on business, like when it makes sense to stand on business, because there are moments where in your career, you've built up enough leverage. And you can look at it. You can look at a release practically and decide, is this going to even make me that much money? Maybe. But probably not, if it's not a single especially, if it's just going to be on Spotify, is it worth bending over for lack of a better word and taking something that isn't fair? If it's not a huge artist and I don't care. And no, I'll give the song to somebody else or like, I don't care. I think it's good to, there are two things to that. One is, I think it's the responsibility of the producer and the manager of the producer who negotiates that when the artist and the label say like, well, they're going to want, you know, percentage of publishing that first and foremost, there should be always a chain, a text chain of all the writers to say, OK, this is what they're coming at. What do we want to do and respond collectively? So even if we agree to the splits that we say, we collectively agree to the splits, really throws them off guard, you know, because then they're like, oh, the way that it works is they can separate the writers and say, well, it's only 5%. When it's really, you know, you have 25% they're like, well, reduce it to 20. It's only 5%. You say, no, you don't understand how math works. That's 20% of my share. And what, and what they'll do, what the labels will do oftentimes. This has happened to me a couple of times and I'm going through it right now and I won't say it with you. They will approach different writers separately, get them to approve their share without even telling them either without telling them the full split or, you know, whatever. And then they'll approach the last writer and be like, hey, so everyone's agreed. So the last one, this is important. Every songwriter who watches this, yeah, whenever a cut happens, the original writers need to talk first. You need to start a chain and everyone needs to agree because the first person who gets hit up, they're going to use you guys against each other. Yeah. And I'm the guy who's always like, I'm sorry, but I'm not agreeing to it. And if they say, well, that's me, you know, they're they're going to, you know, the other people agree to it already. It's like, that's fine, but I'm not going to do that. Also, as a producer, you know, there's a recent situation where the artist wants a percentage. And I said, okay, well, the non-performing, non-producing writer on this is not going to give you this percentage unless you pay that person and you give them a point. And that's not going to come out of my point as the producer. I feel like I am obligated to do that as a as an often just songwriter. But it was nice to call the writer and the manager of the writer and say, hey, they want this. But this is what I got in turn. You're going to check every producer that we can set precedent. That's what that's a whole point in these conversations is like your songwriters will be loyal to you. You should be generous. Everybody, with your collaborators. First of all, I obviously believe in even sports for like 95% of the time. What the fuck are we even talking about? But in general, in negotiations, a couple percentage here, a point here will make you so much more money than being a prick. Because like, when you get to a certain level in music, everybody's good. Like, everyone's good enough and pretty good, or you can get a hit for the most part. There's a threshold. Once you break through a certain tier, it's just like everybody's good. And you're only going to work with people you enjoy being around and people that do good business. Much of my experience songwriting and producing is being a businessman and being like being smart with your relationships and your business. And I've got more work just by people enjoying my company and also have turned down working with certain people that are great because I don't like them because they're assholes or they've tried to fuck over me or a friend or talk crazy to the engineer or whatever, you know. What's the craziest story you've ever had in a city? Oh God. I bet a few.