FAWM Press & Media Kit

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February Album Writing Month (FAWM) is a user-driven online community and songwriting challenge for professional and amateur musicians.

The goal of FAWM is to compose 14 original works of music during the shortest month of the year, or one new song every two days on average. The site’s fast-paced collaborative songwriting approach emphasizes artistic growth and community. “Fawmers” are a mix of music professionals, students, homemakers, and people who work day jobs but rock nightclubs.

History

FAWM was founded in 2004, when singer/songwriter Burr Settles, of Madison, Wis., wanted to hold his fickle muse accountable to write more music. Inspired by NaNoWriMo (he had just finished a novel in November 2003), he recruited friends Matt Hopper (Los Angeles), Willis Fireball (Fairbanks), and Eric Distad (Minneapolis) to join him in February 2004. Since they were spread across the USA, Settles made a blog of sorts (archived here) where they could track progress, link to MP3 demo recordings, and post comments to encourage one another. All four “founding fawmers” met or surpassed the 14-song goal.

Over the next year, other songwriters stumbled across the archive and requested to be involved in 2005. Settles (also a UW-Madison graduate student and freelance web developer) built the more sophisticated website FAWM.ORG and opened it to general participation in 2005, where the challenge has remained ever since.

Since 2006, FAWM has released compilation CDs in a series titled 14 Songs In 28 Days. The first three volumes of this series have featured 14 tracks written during the previous year's challenge, showcasing the diversity and talent of its participants. The CDs are available as thank-you gifts to people who contribute financial support to the FAWM project.

FAWM.ORG is volunteer-driven and funded almost entirely by donations from participants.

New for FAWM 2008

  • As a leap year, there are 29 days (one extra) to complete the challenge. We're encouraging fawmers to write at least one "half" song, or collaboration (co-write) with another fawmer.
  • Fawmers who complete the challenge will be rewarded with free CD distribution through CD Baby. This includes the ability to sell the FAWM album on the CD Baby site, Amazon, iTunes, and more.
  • Once enough songs have been posted to the site, a new "jukebox" feature will appear, allowing people to listen to all public streamable demo recordings, as well as filtering the playlist by genre.

Resources / Downloads

Click on thumbnails for large, high-resolution images:

FAWM Fact Sheet

The FAWM participation base is aged 15 to 60s (average age is 28). About 80% are male and 20% female.

38% of fawmers are professional musicians (a quarter of whom are full-time).
40% of fawmers have released albums of original material before.

Most fawmers are from North America, Europe, Oceania and Japan. In 2007, 25 countries were represented, shown in this cartogram:

The number of songs written each year for FAWM grows exponentially:

Media Coverage and Quotes

“The only thing more satisfying is knowing that there are hundreds—nay, thousands—more excellent and fantastic songs out there in the archives (check their website), and even more yet to be written.”
— Pop Matters

“Only a masochistic songwriter would challenge him- or herself to write an entire album in a month… [FAWM is] an interesting site with a variety of good, weird and just plain awful songs. (Even the awful ones are great in a weird way.)”
— Christian Keifer, Sacramento News & Review

“While [a song every day for a year] may be a bit much for most mortals, you can still join the February Album Writing Month (FAWM) annual songwriting challenge.”
— Abby White, Performing Songwriter

“‘Fawmers,’ as the Web site calls its contributors, are a group of music professionals, students and anyone with a nine-to-five day job (or not) with little to no songwriting experience.”
— Dani Garcia, The Daily Northwestern

“More than 1,000 musicians from as far away as Japan will participate. To foster creativity, FAWM posts weekly songwriting ‘assignments’ on its web site...”
— Leslie Benson, NUVO

“Since songwriting is by nature a solitary pursuit, being connected to other songwriters also trying to come up with 14 songs helps push the participants along, [founder Burr] Settles says. To keep ideas percolating, Settles says he will periodically post ‘challenges’ on the site, such as challenging songwriters to write a song with the word ‘shine’ in the title.”
— Rob Thomas, The Capital Times

“Alaskans in the winter have to keep busy any way they can. So besides reading the dictionary and watching ‘American Idol,’ it’s only inevitable that monthlong challenges would be an appealing pastime… Now in his third year of FAWMing, [Willis] Fireball turned his material into a recently released album, Secret Grey City.”
— Melissa Hart, FBX Square

“Whatever their motivation, these songwriters have taken a unique challenge and succeeded, often impressively.”
— Kiki Schueler, Rick’s Cafe

“... By creating prolific, deadline-oriented submission guidelines, inspiration will strike, and musical magical will happen. Though I was dubious of the album’s concept, I cannot argue with the results. The songs on this album are all very solid, mostly lo-fi acoustic numbers that are derived from writers who make up what they lack in notoriety with pure talent and heart.”
— Jon Aubin, Verbicide

“Great idea and even better music!”
— Smother.Net

“The singers imbibe styles from Sufjan Stevens, David Gray, Red House Painters and R.E.M. to whip up an impressive array of personally enthused tracks.”
— Wonka Vision Magazine

“From the point of view of a guy that couldn't finish fourteen reviews in a month, much less write and record an entire album, [FAWM] seems like quite an undertaking… Although the artists surely had to hurry to get their work written, recorded, and produced, the sum of all their work does not sound hurried in any way.”
— Justin Wright, The Phantom Tollbooth