Beyonce songwriter shares her top seven tips for making it in music

As a songwriter, it doesn't get much bigger than penning a hit with Beyonce, and more than a year after Bey's album Lemonade came out, Carla Marie Williams is still pinching herself that her track Freedom was on it.

She's also written for Girls Aloud, Craig David and Alesha Dixon to name a few, and is all about empowering others to follow in her footsteps, helping young women find success in the male-dominated music industry with her organisation Girls I Rate. Carla shared her top tips for making music your career with Woman’s Hour…

You don’t get much more focused than starting a girl band at the age of 10 (The Lickle Mentions), but fast forward a few years and Carla says the industry struggled to place her as a rock singer.

“As a black woman doing alternative music, they would hear my songs but wouldn’t know how to market me. It became very stressful. I actually lost my voice for a year and I was in speech therapy, I had what was called severe muscular tension from over-singing and anxiety, so my vocal chords were stuck together.

“Then when I started working with [songwriting team] Xenomania in 2007 and had three songs on the Girls Aloud album, had my first top five [hit] I was like, ‘actually what am I stressing about? I'm just going to become a songwriter and go home and watch Emmerdale at 7 o'clock and be really happy and get some cheques through the door!

“You always think, especially as a female, that you have to be front of stage. I find a lot of fulfilment writing for different people, whether it's male or female, in all these different genres. And I can walk down the street and no one knows who I am. If you can diversify, try different things - it's all music.”

“I may have had songs that I love and think I perform great, it could be me, but I’m like ‘well if Beyonce wants it, or Girls Aloud wants it, I'm going to give it to them!’. They've got a bigger platform, and it's going to create revenue so I can do music full time,” says Carla.

She got the call from Beyonce after the singer covered Runnin, a track she wrote with the artist Naughty Boy.

“When you hear something you've done come to life with someone as amazing as Beyonce, you're just like, ‘oh my gosh!’. Her voice is crazy.

“The first time I heard her sing Runnin I had tears, I couldn't believe it. And then when Freedom came out, I still couldn't believe it until I saw it on the video, even though I'd been in the studio with her. I’m still in shock to be fair.”

“I would start with a really good music lawyer or entertainment lawyer,” advises Carla. “[They] can always help you open different doors and avenues because they are negotiating deals daily, so they know all the people at the labels, the publishers, the managers.

“A lot of lawyers are semi A&Rs, so it's their job to spot what the next big thing is. If you've got great demos and a great talent, they will spot it and be like ‘I can champion this’, because they’re ultimately going to make money from it.”

“Be bold, be brave. It's about plugging yourself into the right networks, whether it's people that are talking at events or platforms like Spotify. At my event, Get Heard with PRS and Island Records, we had over 200 girls come down and 50 girls got their music heard, and I've invited some of them down to the studio with me.

“Labels need platforms like this to help find the new talent, so look out for all these things that are offering exposure for your work. Spotify’s a really good platform for artists - you can record your song and start putting it out, people will start discovering you and finding you. And you can shoot a video… call your mates in.”

Don’t forget that if you’re writing music, you might not get paid until a song hits the airwaves, sometimes years later - so remember not to put all your financial eggs in one basket.

“I would suggest multitasking and getting a part-time job until you're in that place where you can sustain doing music full-time. I was a youth worker before and I gave up my job, once I started making money from music,” says Carla.

“Someone gave me a good bit of advice when I first started songwriting; ‘live by half your means’. So even when I got my first publishing deal, it was the first time I made a lot of money but I split it in half and put half in a bank account. And I did that for three years.”

“I'm a big one for mood boards,” says Carla, “so if you feel like ‘I'm inspired by this person’ or ‘I'd love to sound like that person’, create a mood board that basically creates a vision for yourself and your sound, and then it will help you to channel where you're trying to go.”

Beyonce too is “very into visuals”, as Carla discovered when she went to LA to work with her.

“When I got there, she’d been planning the album, so I saw a moodboard of ideas and feelings and emotions that she wanted to talk about. I'm very pro women, I'm very proud to be a black woman and a black person so I took the idea of that... It just so happened we're both mentally in the same place of wanting to pioneer and push women and black women to the forefront.”

Just because she’s in Beyonce’s phonebook, it doesn’t mean Carla is going to rest on her laurels.

“Wake up every day and challenge yourself. Keep going, don't make excuses. I live and breathe what I do, and everything I do I give 200 per cent to," she says.

“I've been working with Britney Spears, Craig David, Paloma Faith, Clean Bandit. Now I really want to work with Adele or Jennifer Hudson - I love divas.

“The industry's very much about ‘what did you last do?’ and ‘how many times have you done it?’ and ‘can you actually do it again?’. I'm hoping people will learn from Beyonce and give people opportunities.

“So Adele if you’re out there, I need to work with you!”

You can hear more from Carla in a special BBC Music Day edition of Woman's Hour. Find out more about her work with Girls I Rate on their website.