Kip Moore wants to help the songwriters. You’d be hard pressed to find someone as unique and true to themself as Kip Moore. And I always have to mention that he just might be the most interesting man in the country music world. He loves to ride a wave surfing out on the ocean just as much as he likes to ride a hit onto the country charts, and he appreciates keeping life exciting… like when he ran into the cartel during a motorcycle trip through Mexico. The “Damn Love” singer loves to live life differently than everybody, and in a recent interview on the God’s Country podcast, he revealed that he’s going to do something different than any other artist out there. Kip Moore feels responsible for taking care of the songwriters that have helped build Nashville into what it is today. Though he writes most of his own stuff, he recognizes that the way the music industry has shifted has not benefited career songwriters even in the slightest: “Songwriters are just starving out. When I think about their gig now, and the difference that it was with mine when I was coming through – and it wasn’t like I was coming through that long ago. It’s just changed so rapidly in the last few years. You’re only thinking, ‘Single, single, single’ and that’s it, because of the way that the streams don’t really pay the same. The mechanicals are gone. For the ones that write the songs and make it all possible for everybody to have these careers, and the fans to find the joy in going to shows. When you are going to hear George Strait perform ‘Run’ and you love that song, he didn’t write that song. Those are two other guys that are pros. Even though I write my own stuff, I’m still connected to songwriters and the community that I care about. They help me get my vision through there.” Simply put, country music wouldn’t be where it is today without its songwriters. So Kip Moore has a plan. With where he’s at in his career, he feels very fortunate. The country star is deciding that, from now on, he’s going to give any songwriter that helps him craft a song a piece of his masters. He’s doing so because, in his mind, that’s the only way to make the songwriter’s current situation a livable situation: “If I wait on the machine to fix the machine, I might be dead and gone before then. I’m in a position now to where when I think about if someone would have told me when I was 29 years old, ‘This is where you are going to be sitting in your mid 40s.’ I would have said, ‘For real?’ So I think about how greed can come into play where I’m like, ‘I’m doing it, this is my thing. What the industry says is mine. They’re my masters.’ But I just think about what built Nashville, and the sacrifices that songwriters make, and I think about the sacrifices that songwriters I know invest time in me. So I’m going to try, this time around, to give every single writer a little piece of my masters moving forward. I hope to try to get a little trickle effect. If you are getting a six or seven thousand dollar check at the end of the year just from streaming, your mindset changes as writers.” Generally, songwriters only have a cut of the publishing… which is owning the composition of the song (melody, lyrics, etc…) and not the actual recording of it. And long complicated story short, they get a fraction of a fraction of a penny for every stream on it. They get paid in other ways (when an album is purchased or downloaded, when a song is used in a movie) but with streaming being a primary driver of music consumption these days, it’s tough to make a lot of money solely as a songwriter. And the more songwriters you have on a song, the more you have to split the pot. Morgan Wallen can record one of your songs, and if it is a deep cut without any radio play, you can still only wind up with few thousand bucks out of it. Masters, on the other hand, are the other side of the musical coin. They are the actual, official recording of the song, which is usually owned by the label, or maybe the artist and the label. And they can earn money in some of the same ways as publishing, but on Spotify for example, master owners receive the vast majority of the streaming royalty (roughly 80/20). So again… it’s just hard for songwriters to make a good amount of money unless they’re writing hit singles every other week. That’s a very cursory glance at how it works, but overall, splitting masters is something that no other artist is doing right now, it would be a game changer for songwriters. And like Kip Moore said, he’s hoping that he can create a movement where it becomes commonplace, and songwriters are, in turn, taken care of. You can hear more from the country music star in the interview below: Kip Moore – God’s Country Podcast The post “They’re Starving Out”: How Kip Moore Is Taking a Massive Stand for Nashville’s Struggling Songwriters first appeared on Whiskey Riff.