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The Next Big Thing

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Melina's success has its perks, the least of which is the ability to run down his curriculum vitae and talk music business at a table at Starbucks, clad in white Adidas tennis gear. (An aging British baby boomer with a tight smile and a head full of curly silvering black hair, Melina is a vague ringer for Monty Python mainstay Michael Palin.) He's just finished a match and has another scheduled for later in the day, at which he'll arrive in a black Lexus with a license plate that reads: MUSIC PUB.

Melina has made his living on the side of the music world where the real money is: publishing. When Carla Carter writes a song, she automatically owns it. But songwriters typically aren't salespeople, and they lack reliable methods of getting their work into the hands of artists. Music publishers like Melina sell their networking services in exchange for a share of royalties.

Melina's iPod is his portfolio. In the past he'd have to tote around acetates or CD demos; now he simply hands buyers his earbuds and hits "Play." Still, while technology has revolutionized the science of songwriting, the process of hitmaking hasn't changed in at least half a century. To borrow a page out of Alan Melina's dictionary: A music publisher is like a car salesman.

"It's not enough to have good material — which is of course hard enough," explains Tess Taylor, president and founder of the National Association of Record Industry Professionals, an industry trade group. "You have to be able to get it into the right hands. It's extremely competitive. Getting a song on a Beyoncé record, or even a Barry Manilow record, is big money. People are lined up for blocks to get that."

Melina is always at the front of that line. He brunches with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame record exec Clive Davis, has Randy Jackson's cell phone number and can walk into Atlantic Records headquarters in New York and be greeted with a hearty handshake.

"He doesn't have to go through third parties anymore," Taylor says of Melina. "He's brilliant at conceiving methods of getting to the right people. He's a terrier, the guy. He's absolutely unstoppable when he gets his teeth into something. That's the kind of publisher you want — and need — to represent you."

Still, the odds against any given song are staggering. First of all, says Melina, "It hasn't been recorded. And if it hasn't been recorded, it's not going to make any money. My bank manager would say it has 'zero value.' If I'm looking to get a song on the Beyoncé record and there's ten songs on that record, she writes maybe seven of them." That leaves three open slots, and every songwriter in the world is gunning for them.

Andy Goldmark does the math: "You make eight and a half to nine cents per song for every copy. If she sells a million units, you make $85,000 to $90,000 for the song."

Radio play pays another few cents per spin. Say Beyoncé's record tops the urban and pop charts, crosses over to adult contemporary stations, jumps the Atlantic and explodes in Europe. Goldmark: "You're looking at a very substantial amount of money: half a million to a million dollars."

Without connections, 7Fourteen would have a tough time getting their phone calls returned, much less placing Carla Carter's songs on million-sellers.

"It's like the U.S. Open," says Melina, his mind turning to tennis. "Try walking in as a wild card. The song has to be awesome. Good ain't good enough. Great is OK. If you think it's great, then sit for a week and think how you can make it classic, awesome, inevitably a standard."

Not long ago Carla Carter was working in the Juniors department at Dillard's at Westfield South County mall and writing songs in her spare time. Her contract with 7Fourteen includes only small financial advances, not enough to make ends meet. When she had to make a songwriting trip west, she'd have to ask the department store for days off. That ended in May, when 7Fourteen's demands outstripped Dillard's financial hold and Carter quit to make music full-time.

Carter's first big break had come at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport — and she wasn't even there. Her mother, Joyce McCowan, worked for American Airlines and was at the ticket counter when members of the Philadelphia rap group the Roots showed up, fresh from a show at the Pageant with Chicago rapper Common. McCowan noticed one member of the group, Kelo Saunders, who was plunking his keyboard while waiting to board.

She got him a good seat on the plane, McCowan remembers, and then, after exchanging pleasantries, told Saunders her daughter was a singer and songwriter.

Saunders gave McCowan his phone number. Not five minutes later, Carter called and sang to him as he boarded his flight.

"If she was really a singer and a songwriter, she would call, and I would hear her," Saunders says in retrospect. "Sometimes you just gotta give [people] a shot.

"She was like a little hummingbird," he adds. "She has a very beautiful voice."

Saunders invited Carter to Philadelphia. She came two weeks later (with her mother as chaperone) and stayed for two months, working with Saunders and Roots drummer ?uestlove, and sleeping in the guest room Erykah Badu used before she went platinum. Through Saunders Carter met platinum-selling producer Scott Storch, whose hits include Beyoncé's "Baby Boy" and Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River."

McCowan is recounting the tale in the dining room of the single-story shotgun house, painted pea-green on the outside, where her mother, Jannie Haynes, lives on North Sarah Street. Haynes, whose late husband was a Baptist minister, says many of her fifteen children learned to play music and passed along the art to their own kids. "We played at a funeral in Chicago and someone said, 'You all should get a bus and go on tour,'" she says.

Carter says she took piano and violin lessons as a child, but when she took up voice lessons, something clicked.

A younger sister, Carly, whom everyone calls Miss B, made up songs for them to sing. "[Carla] didn't have any interest in writing songs until her sophomore year of high school," says Carly.

To this day Carla insists her sister is the better songwriter, and Carly doesn't deny it.

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