SoundOut: new music review platform powered by SliceThePie

Are you familiar with SliceThePie, the UK based fan funding website, competitor to Sellaband, where fans get paid to scout and review new up and coming bands? Here’s a review I posted a couple of months back. The site has been making good progress these past 2 years (pretty much like Sellaband actually – although both sites focus on the same business model, they operate in very different ways, and both are massively developing their services. Talk about healthy competition), and now they just came out with a new concept called SoundOut that uses its community to give objective ratings and statistics not on the traction of a song, but on its market potential.

Most analytical tools and services for bands (like DashGo) will give them technical data on how their songs or brand are evolving on the net (through basic stuff like page views in social networks, mentions in blogs, downloads in online stores etc.). This is very important info of course for those willing to spend time analyzing it, but it lacks real consumer feedback.

This is the problem SoundOut tries to solve – and here’s how it works:

You can submit any of your tracks for review via SoundOut for $20, $40 or $50.Your track is then fed to SliceThePie’s community (to about 80 active users), who most likely proceed to check-mark some options, enter some tags and write a short review.

• For $20 you get the basic review that includes ratings from 1 to 10, and percentages of how people rated the song. (see sample here).hmmm

• The $40 review is a little less basic. In addition to the basic review’s data, you get a “sentiment analysis of the key components of your track” that “illustrates which elements of the track were most often commented on by the reviewers and what they thought of them” (sample). re-hmmm

• And for $50 you get the express review (receive your review within 24 hours). arf..

Now yes, this is interesting, and I like the approach, but the samples don’t really motivate me to pay 20 bucks for such basic info (although I’ll probably submit one of my tunes just for fun). What turns me off a bit is their rating system. If you look at the samples you’ll see the song got a 7.69 note, thus was considered to be “excellent”. Can’t stand that type of blunt categorization because I personally think the song isn’t “excellent”.

Robert Wyatt’s Old Europe is an EXCELLENT song, Stevie Wonder’s Superstition is an EXCELLENT song, The Headless Heroes’ The North Wind Blew South is an EXCELLENT song. Elton John’s Rocket Man is an EXCELLENT song.

Scars on 45′s Heart On Fire is an good AVERAGE catchy pop tune, that certainly has its merits in terms of songwriting, but that is deprived of real musical research, experimentation and originality.

Now if you look at the “Standard Review Sentiment Analysis”‘s graph for Heart On Fire, you’ll see that its commerciability rating goes through the roof. Thus the rating that accompanies the 7.69 grade should clearly indicate “This track has excellent POTENTIAL for viable music business opportunities amongst the teenage, 15 to 22 year old, feminine gender”, or something similar (No! I shall make no excuses for my being a musical elitist!)

To conclude, I’ll just say that I believe SoundOut is on the right track, and that Slice The Pie’s general reasoning behind the concept is great, really great. Outsourcing song reviews to the public was already a pretty tight idea, but bands had to be part of the SliceThePie system and follow up on their progress (leading to time consuming social-network tasks). Now to be able to send any track any time to their army of “A&R scouts” for an affordable price is fantastic for anyone who seeks fast and objective feedback (although a little too objective and general for now as not everyone has the same expectations for their music.) Something they should do is let the bands propose their own rating-criteria so they can really get focused feedback on things that matter to them.

My two cents.

Mruff, mruff and away.

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Artist Share: when fan funding is not all about sharing royalties

Here is a little note on yet another fan funding website called Artist Share. Its model differs from those of SellABand or SliceThePie where any band can sign-up and start the funding process right away.

Artist Share is selective: either you’re accepted or you’re not, and the site apparently aims at pretty specific styles of instrumental music like classical and jazz. Another important difference is that fans don’t necessarily obtain shares of the produced album, and therefore don’t perceive royalties from its sales.

Although Artist Share clearly isn’t for everyone, it still offers a nice take on the fan-funding model. In exchange for financial support, the fans are offered access to a more personal and probably more rewarding side of the production – the creative process.

We had already talked about the band Shane Hines and the Trance who had devised a donation plan to get their album funded by offering donors personal attention like guitar lessons, free cooked dinners, house concerts etc (read the story here). Artist Share works a little along those lines. In exchange for donations, fans receive different offers depending on the amount of their donation. Prices start at a couple of bucks and can go up to thousands of dollars with offers ranging from limited edition CD/DVD packages to an invitation to a recording session. The artists really chooses what he wants to throw in the deals.

Lots of offers are about helping the fan get to know his band a little better by making the experience personal. By doing so not only does the artist feel validated but so does his donor-audiences. I think this brings great value to the creative process as the main actors, the bands and their fans, work together for the completion of the project.

What better way to consolidate healthy long-lasting relationships with your fans then by helping them help you. In most cases that’s what they all strive for.

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How bands can fund their next album: social record-labels

Social networks for bands are great for networking and getting your music heard, but passed that point it’s pretty hard to determine whether or not your music is really appealing to others. Your family is certainly not the place to start to feel validated. Your friends can deliver better insight, although their point of view is obviously biased. As for Myspace, it’s a lot easier to add thousands of friends than to acquire real fans.

There are some websites who put more emphasis on the interaction between bands and their fans. Those websites not only represent real validation for the artist, but also big-time opportunities. The other day we took a look at DeepRockDrive, a great site that allows fans to get their bands booked for an online show. Today we’ll look review two websites that allows fans to fund your albums.

Sellaband.com is a place where music fans can invest in upcoming bands. If a band finds 5000 people to spend 10 bucks on the making of their album, they get sent into a studio to record it. In other words the site helps bands raise $50 k from the community to produce a set of songs. The ‘believers’ as they call them, are then entitled to royalties on the album sales. A nice web 2.0 win/win solution that has attracted a lot of hype. The community is creating the content but it’s also choosing and funding it.

Not only has Sellaband recently raised a big chunk of money from its investors to further developp its model, but an analog UK website, barely founded a year ago, has now apeared to fill in the european market.

Slicethepie.com is a little more complex than sellaband in that it filters bands thanks to ‘scouts’. Before reaching the financing stage, bands must first be subject to preliminary reviews by music fans. Anyone can sign-up as a critic/a&r, head for the ‘scout rooms’ and get paid for their reviews. On the artist front, they enter ‘arenas’ where they are opposed to up to 1000 other bands. A maximum of 20 will make it through to a voting stage. The most popular bands receive £15,000 to finance their album. Fans can also directly invest in an artists giving them royalty benefits and other goodies. But here things get complicated so I really suggest reading how their whole financing plan works cause I will certainly not explain it better then they do (in summary the fan/investors get backstage passes and free CDs plus the possibility to buy stocks/contracts that they will be able to trade and sell in the Slicethepie market place). What’s important here is that fans become emotionally and financially involved in their band’s progress, and start to feel like A&R stock-exchange record-label broker journalists or something. I have been on their forums and read that people spend hours a days reviewing music and getting paid for it.They aren’t making a living but they have a blast.

Here both fans and bands get validated actually, portraying what the future myspaces might become: interactive websites where this simple calling-card profile type model is obsolete, moving onto more dynamic places where interaction and validation are as important as what the band wants to display.

Concerning band validation, I suggest a great post  form the Music Think Tank blog: create, validate, sell.

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