Social News

How to Earn Money by Inviting Artists to Music Xray

Posted by Mike McCready | October 23rd, 2017 | No responses

See the number of affiliates you have in account settings, found by clicking on your profile name in the upper left part of the site, once you've logged in.

See the number of affiliates you have in account settings, found by clicking on your profile name in the upper left part of the site, once you’ve logged in.

No matter what type of account you have on Music Xray, be it a fan account, an artist account, or an approved industry professional account, you can earn money when you invite artists to open an artist account.

To invite other artists, just log in to your account and then click this link. Each artist will receive an invitation, on your behalf, to join Music Xray. Their account will become an affiliate of your account and you will receive 15% of Music Xray’s margin on every submission they make, forever.  The balance accumulates in your own Music Xray account. You can spend the balance within Music Xray or you can cash it out via PayPal any time the balance is greater than $20.
You can see how many affiliates your account has by going to Account Settings.

You can see the balance you’ve earned by going to Account Balance.

See your account balance under your username at the top right of your screen when logged in.

See your account balance under your username at the top right of your screen when logged in.

How great music bubbles to the top on Music Xray

Posted by Mike McCready | January 24th, 2017 | 9 Responses

This video explains how great music bubbles to the top and gets the attention of the industry on Music Xray. It begins with a brief history of how Music Xray evolved from a pay-to-submit site into a sophisticated filter for the industry and an indispensable tool for artists.

How To Get The Most Of Music Xray

Posted by Mike McCready | August 29th, 2016 | No responses

In this video we tell you three things:

1. What most people think Music Xray is Vs. What Music Xray really is.
2. How to get the most of Music Xray without spending any money
3. How to get the most of Music Xray by spending the very least.

This video is about 25 minutes long but it is well worth your time. Those who watch it will have a competitive advantage over those who don’t.

Text version:

In this video I’m going to tell you three things.

1st – I’m going to tell you what most people think Music Xray is vs what Music Xray actually is.

2nd – I’m going to tell you how to get the most from the site without spending any money.

and 3rd – I’m going to tell you how to get the maximum value from the site by spending the very least.

It’s about 20 minutes long. But when you’re finished watching it you’ll be able to master the use of Music Xray.

So here we go…

What Most think Music Xray is vs What it actually is.

Most people assume Music Xray is an artist services company that helps musicians get their music to the attention of the talent scouts and decision makers in the industry – and the truth is that although we provide that service better and less expensively than any other company ever has, we do not think of ourselves PRIMARILY as an artist services company. Music Xray is PRIMARILY an industry filter.

We do not measure our success by how many artists we help get deals and exposure. We measure our success by how widely adopted Music Xray is by industry professionals and by how many of those professionals regard Music Xray as an indispensable tool for finding new songs and talent.

Many assume that our big business idea, and central to our strategy, is to hype the artists up, sell them the dream of making it big, and to collect as many submission fees as we possibly can.

But that’s not what we do at all. That’s an important distinction.

The job of an artist services company would be to sell as much to musicians as possible. But the job of a filter is to filter in the good stuff and filter out the stuff that isn’t quite ready or not appropriate for the available opportunities.

So in that effort we’ve invested a lot of resources in providing musicians with fast feedback and even meticulously calculated Selection Prediction scores that while not perfect, are pretty accurate. Often, that feedback serves as an early reality check. And the submission fees on the site aren’t there so we can get rich. They serve as the first stage of a multi-stage filter which puts the musicians in the position of filtering themselves first. Those who get great feedback and are gaining traction are encouraged to continue on. Those who get a reality check often reconsider whether they should keep spending resources on that song.

So if our big business idea isn’t to just collect submissions fees, what is our business? I’ll get to that.

But the immediate effect of submissions fees for the industry is that the music that is less likely to succeed makes way for the music that more professionals are going to want to hear. That keeps the industry engaged and respecting Music Xray as a source of more consistently high potential music. It turn, that’s better for the deserving artists whose music needs to break through the noise. That said, we know the filter isn’t perfect so our system doesn’t ban any musicians. If someone is supremely confident in their song or talent despite less that positive initial feedback, they can keep submitting – but since it costs a little bit of money for each submission, if the feedback doesn’t improve they will more than likely eventually accept it’s not going to happen for that song and stop pushing it. So just to be clear, we create the right incentives but we don’t shut anyone out.

I’m going to come back to this topic later in the video when I talk about how to get the very most for the least amount spent, but first I want to tell you how you can get value from Music Xray without spending any money at all.

How to get the most of Music Xray without spending money

There are a number of free features on Music Xray that many musicians use to advance their careers, and we’re all in favor of that. As I said, we’re not trying to extract every penny we can from musicians – our primary service is to the industry – so if we can be helpful to musicians without a cost to you and without detriment to us, then that’s a win for everyone.

Free feature number 1: Song to opportunity matching.

You can open an account for free on Music Xray and you can upload as much of your music as you want for zero cost. Each song you upload gets analyzed by our music analysis software and it gets compared to reference tracks that many industry professionals upload. So for each song you upload, you get a notification immediately telling you which industry professionals on the site have uploaded songs as references that sound and feel like yours. It’s not always a perfect match but it’s pretty good, and sometimes professionals upload reference tracks that don’t sound anything like what they’ve described in their brief when you go look at their listing so it can be confusing sometimes, but this gives you a good idea whether there are professionals on the site looking for what you’ve got.

Ideally, you would make your submission to these professionals through Music Xray but hey, this is the digital world and you’re going to Google the professionals, look them up on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, & Instagram. So go for it unless they specifically say they don’t want to be contacted via other channels in which case you might tick them off. But even if they say that, you might get lucky. Some have. But those channels are pretty clogged and don’t have a filter so it’s harder to get their attention. If you don’t, you can always come back here.

You find the initial opportunity matches in that first notification but we re-run the matches every couple weeks, so you can always come back and check your notifications in the future for your opportunity Digest or you can always click the Sonic Opportunity Match button next to each song on your track dashboard to see what the most recent matches are.

Keep in mind that not all professionals on the site have uploaded reference tracks, so another way of getting free value from Music Xray is to just browse the opportunity listings. You can filter them by genre, amount the opportunities pay to chosen artists, type of opportunity, and more. There are usually more than 2000 available opportunities at any one time.

The next free feature is Fan Matching. There are nearly a million music fans with accounts on Music Xray and we track their listening habits via their Facebook accounts, which in turn are often linked to the Spotify accounts, plus they list their favorite major acts for us.

When you enter the metadata for your song, we ask you to list three major acts that influenced that particular song. When you enter the names of the acts, try thinking of the acts whose fans you think would love your song. Don’t be afraid to choose an obscure act. If it’s in our database our software will be able to know which other acts those fans like too, so actually, the more specific you are, the better.

Then, go back to the Tracks dashboard and you will see the number of potential fans in our database who might be your fans if only they heard your music. Since the fans on Music Xray are pretty reflective of the market in general, the information you can get for free is simply knowing which of your songs is likely to have the largest potential audience – and that can be valuable data as you decide how to promote your song through other channels. I’ll come back to how you can target the specific potential fans in our database a little later in this video.

The next free service on Music Xray I want to tell you about is the free song page and the free portfolios.

When you upload your song, it’s always good to enter the song’s metadata – as much as you can including the lyrics, an artist bio, license information, a YouTube video link if you have one, an image, and more. You will see that each song has a permalink. Click that and it takes you to your song’s own page. You can use that URL to send your song to anyone – including the previously mentioned industry professionals if you can reach them through other channels.

Additionally, you can create portfolios of songs – as many portfolios as you want – each containing a different number or combination of songs. Then you can send the link to the portfolio to anyone and they can play the songs right from that link and visit each individual song page if they want. That’s all free. Use the heck out of it!!

The last free feature may be the best one because it can actually get your song in front of industry professionals right on the site. It goes back to the metadata. Enter as much of it as you can. Here’s why.

One of our killer features for industry professionals is called Needlestack Music Search. It’s primary purpose is to show industry professionals the songs and acts that are being heard and rated highly by many other professionals. But often, music supervisors and others are looking for songs that are pretty obscure and may not have been heard by many professionals or maybe not by ANY professionals. So how could they find your song even if it’s never been submitted to a single professional on the site?

– They can upload a reference track right in that moment. If it sounds like yours and there are few other songs in the database that match and that have been heard by other professionals, or if the songs in the database that sound similar have been heard and rated poorly, your song will come up among the top matches.

– A professional might be looking for a song that was influenced by one of the acts that you entered in your metadata. Again, if there are few others or those others were poorly rated, your song could come up on top of the search.

– They could be looking for any combination of things but also enter more specific criteria like a beats-per-minute range, or a male or female vocal – or no vocal at all…..

Priority in the search engine is usually given to songs that match the professional’s search criteria and that have also been heard by other professionals and rated highly, but if the search is narrow enough and it matches your song, the professionals can hear it and have the option to contact you.

And that’s another thing. I know our site tends to send out too many emails. We’re taking steps to reduce that and we’re also going to implement a way for us to send you a text message to your phone specifically for when professionals are trying to contact you, but even if you grow numb to our emails, be sure you pay attention if you ever get one from us that has the word “selected” or “new message” in the subject line. These may be among the most important to your career.

Next, I want to stress to you that if your song is of the kind that has a hook – or a most compelling part, use the hook brackets to mark it. There are a lot of reasons for this.

1st – professionals are well, professionals and they want to get right to what they are looking for. Not all of them want to go straight to the hook, and those who don’t will just start your song from the beginning and play it through. But many may just pass over your song if there are other songs where they don’t have to wait for the gold. Give them the option to start at the hook. By not giving them the option don’t think you’re going to necessarily get a full listen of the song. Often, if you don’t grab their attention in the first few seconds you have it, you won’t get the next few seconds. Bracketing your hook is a way to make sure you hook their attention.

2nd – some professionals are looking for great hook writers or even great hooks they can license from you. Give them that option. Don’t worry, if you don’t want to sell the hook you can always say no. But don’t let an offer go by that your would otherwise have gotten – even if the only value is to create a new contact or start a new relationship with a professional in the industry.

There are many musicians who have used Music Xray to build relationships and actually never got an offer on the site, but have gone on to write for major artists due to relationships they established here.

OK. Now I’m going talk about how you can spend the least on the site and get the most value.

1st – Get Diagnostics for a few of your best songs – without submitting them to any opportunities yet.

Diagnostics is a required purchase for any song you may eventually submit to an opportunity. It costs $10 and you CAN buy it simultaneously with a submission but the only time I’d recommend that is if the opportunity you want to submit to has a tight window and is going to close soon. Otherwise, it’s best to wait for your Diagnostics results.

We didn’t create Diagnostics to get an extra $10 out of you. We created it so that you can get some fast, inexpensive, real feedback – and there’s another purpose for it that I’ll come back to a little later. But for you, the purpose is to find out how competitive your song is going to be for the opportunities currently on the site.

When a song goes through Diagnostics, it gets sent to 5 industry professionals who work in your song’s genre. They listen and they rate your song on 5 criteria – composition, production, arrangement, performance, and hit potential. Hit potential doesn’t necessarily mean “hit song” – it means commercial success potential for the type of song it is. A jazz song played on the accordion could, in theory, have high hit potential when compared to other jazz songs played on the accordion vying for opportunities looking for that kind of music. I just want to be clear about what that criteria means.

In Diagnostics, the song is also distributed out to 20 potential fans – selected randomly from among those who are fans of the acts you entered in your metadata. They each give the song a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And by the way, if they give it a thumbs up you get their email address and often a link to their Facebook profile so you can see who your fans are. You’re acquiring the fans, so to speak.

Once we have compiled the data, we show you some really cool things.

– The average ratings you got from the 5 professionals.

– The number and percent of fans who heard the song and gave it a thumbs up. This is your fan conversion rate and you can compare several of your songs to see which ones convert the highest percentage of fans. If you’re debating which song is your single, this could give you strong clues. We also show you what the cost of acquiring a fan is on Music Xray. If you decide you’d like to acquire more fans, we will send each potential fan your song for 33 cents each. Based on the percentage of those who hear it vs those who give it a thumbs up, we can calculate the approximate cost of acquiring each fan. In the future we plan to add the ability to geo-target your fans and to target by age and gender too. And you can always see the number of potential fans that exist in our database as calculated by the acts you entered in your metadata. So once you have this information from Diagnostics you can decide if you want to target more fans or not – and if it’s worth it to you.

– and perhaps most importantly, we calculate a Selection Prediction score. What the score says is basically the following: If you submit this song to 20 appropriate opportunities on the site, you have a X percent chance of having it selected for one of those opportunities or of your song being offered something if found through Needlestack Music Search or other ways we call industry attention to songs.

Why 20 opportunities? Well, it’s not because we want to get 20 submission fees from you. It’s because we use Amazon’s Machine Learning platform to calculate the score. Amazon’s Machine Learning Platform is cloud computing and a little bit of artificial intelligence – kind of like IBM’s Watson, which you may have heard of. – And in order to be really confident in the accuracy of the score, it had to calculate the probability over 20 submissions. Any fewer and the software’s confidence in its accuracy dropped.

Now, a low score doesn’t mean success can’t happen for the song. It just means that it may take more submissions, or that there are fewer than 20 potential opportunities on the site for songs like yours. You have to decide what to do at this stage – but this information can guide you.

OK, and now to the elephant in the room – what if you don’t care about this information and you resent that you have to pay $10 for Diagnostics. Try to keep in mind that Diagnostics is an integral part of our filter and without it we can’t do our job of filtering. Back before we had Diagnostics, many musicians would come to the site and submit their song to one opportunity, have the song rejected and go away angry not understanding that even the best material is likely to be rejected at least a few times, and even songs with a 99% Selection Prediction Score today might have to submit 20 times before landing something, and even a few of them still need to be shown to more professionals. So back before we had Diagnostics, with that one submission we here at Music Xray hadn’t gathered enough information about the song to know if it was any good or not and the artist also wasn’t getting any truly relevant feedback – just that one professional didn’t think it was the right fit for them.

So we created Diagnostics to help us predict, as accurately as possibly, which songs and acts were most likely to be offered deals of one kind or another through the site. Sometimes we invest in those songs and acts in exchange for a 20% participation in the deals. We’ve recently changed our terms of service so that we can participate in deals if they occur not through a direct submission but rather through the song being found by the industry professionals due to some of our software magic.

So our job is NOT to collect as many submission fees as we can. It is to predict which songs and acts will get offers and then to find ways to add value – or to be a catalyst in getting that song a deal so Music Xray can participate in the upside.

And remember I said I’d come back to how our business works and how we aspire to make most of our money? That’s how.

So Diagnostics is a win for everyone.

– It discourages hundreds of songs from clogging the pipeline further and thereby clearing the way for yours – keeping the industry engaged.

– It helps us identify high-potential songs so we can help find opportunities for them, even when the artist doesn’t directly submit them to certain professionals.

– It helps gather enough information, industry feedback, and fan feedback about a song so that it will show up in relevant Needlestack Music Searches that professionals conduct

– It helps songs show up as trending among the professional community – and it’s basically drives Music Xray’s filter.

Finally, let’s talk about the submissions themselves.

The only way to guarantee any individual professional will hear any specific song is to submit it to them directly.

As I’ve mentioned throughout this video, we have a lot of software magic that does show songs to professionals which have not been directly submitted to them. But the only way to guarantee any particular song is heard by a specific professional for a specific opportunity is to make the submission. We have money-back guarantee that you will receive a listen and a response from the professional within 45 days, tops. Many are much faster, especially if they’re working on a tight window or deadline.

Also, after Diagnostics has completed and if the ratings are high, your song will trend among the industry community for a few weeks but eventually will start to give way to song with more recent activity in Needlestack Music Search. So one way to keep it current is to submit it directly to opportunities. The new professional will hear your song and probably provide their own rating for it whether they select it or not. The new rating counts as activity around your song.

The best way to know if your song is trending or not is to check out this chart on your Song Management Page. Each time a fan or a professional hears your song and reacts to it, it boosts the songs activity level and it’s trending potential. If the song is trending it’s being shown to more professionals who didn’t receive it as a direct submission.

Now here’s the thing… if you attempt to directly submit your song for a specific opportunity, and we have already shown your song to the professional behind that opportunity although you had not submitted it – we tell you. We don’t just take your money and let you make the submission anyway. Again… we’re not trying to nickel and dime you.

Now, when you make these direct submissions you may get a custom response. But more than likely you will simply get a notice telling you whether the song was selected, not selected, or placed on hold – and you may get a quick response the professional can choose from a list that matches their reason for not selecting the song if that’s the case. Remember, the professionals are not in the business of giving you detailed feedback about how you can improve your music. They’re here to find the music they can work with and to move on.

If you want detailed feedback, we do provide a way for you to get it from some professionals who want to offer it. And that’s where you will likely pay a little bit more – because in that case you actually are paying for the professional’s time and expertise. You will find professionals who offer this service under the categories “Professional Song Critique” and “Career Coaching” in our opportunity search engine.

OK, lastly… we recently added a way for you to target radio stations for consideration. It’s a small part of the service currently but we’re building it out. You can geo-target stations and you can also target them by genre and you can submit to multiple stations at once. When program directors hear your music they can decide to spin it on their station and they can tell you what date they will start to spin it so you can coordinate your own promotion efforts.

I think that about covers it. And look, as co-founder and CEO of the company, the message I really wanted to convey here is that we’re a company working hard to build something great for the entire ecosystem. We’re not perfect and Music Xray isn’t a silver bullet. But I think it really is one of the best tools ever built for musicians and industry professional alike. If you have questions to concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us at support@musicxray.com

It’s an honor to serve you. If you’re still with me, thanks for taking the time to really understand Music Xray.

– Mike McCready

Data-assisted music discovery for music consumers – can the labels, publishers, and others keep pace?

Posted by Mike McCready | February 5th, 2016 | No responses

This week we’ve seen another music discovery service acquired by one of the large music streaming services when Irish start-up Soundwave was acquired by Spotify. This is the second Spotify acquisition of a data analytics company it is using to help consumers find the best new music they are likely to love.

Recently, it seems like every big consumer-facing music streaming company has been shoring up its ability to stay ahead of consumer taste. Pandora acquired Next Big Sound, Apple acquired MusicMetric, and others are working on internal systems all in an effort to provide better discovery for listeners. Executives at the steaming services believe that it is key to their competitiveness to hook users into their service by helping them discover new music they love.

As thees capabilities improve, traditional music promotion by the music labels will become decreasingly effective. The streaming companies want to channel the best new music to their listeners regardless of whether the artists are signed to a label – although the big labels are employing various strategies to insure they aren’t outflanked – primarily shoring up their advantages in their licensing agreements with the streamers.  Additionally, Universal Music hired Jay Frank in 2015 and appointed him Senior Vice President of Global Streaming Marketing, showing they understand that the ways to reach the ears of consumers is changing for everyone in the ecosystem.

This is of course all driven by market forces and consumer demand. But it signals that the labels, publishers and others in the ecosystem need to reinforce their early discovery efforts and capabilities if they want to stay ahead of the curve. After all, they only make money if they add value and they can only add value if they get in early enough to contribute to the music’s success.

This is why Music Xray has been building its own proprietary ecosystem for so long. We realized that you can only go so far with data generated out in the wild and it’s an arms race among those with access to the best data. When upstart musicians and their teams buy Facebook likes, YouTube streams, and other social markers they distort the field making it harder for legitimate players to stand out. By owning their own data analytics companies, Spotify and Pandora are essentially plugging in their own proprietary data they don’t necessarily share with others. But even so, they are using data generated by consumers which is so often influenced by factors that are hard to isolate and account for. Furthermore, there is little online activity surrounding songwriters and production teams who don’t have aspirations of making it as performers themselves. So much new material and talent continue to go undetected by many industry players.

As we’ve increased our ability to spot the successful music just before it lands its first industry deal, we’ve begun to make actual investments in the music – investments into music opportunities others can’t even begin to see. Together with our investment partner, Digital Daruma, we’re leveraging our predictive model and are starting to own revenue streams in the music itself.

Music Xray controls the quality of the data in our ecosystem and we use a combination of crowd-sourcing of industry ears, music analysis software, targeted fan reaction, and machine learning to make predictions in which we are 92% confident are accurate. You can hear a small fraction of the kind of music we’re uncovering by listening to our podcast each week.

Follow us here on the blog for updates over the next few weeks regarding the progress and status of our investment program and learn how we’re making it the focus of our business.

Why Emailing Your Music, Sending it via Facebook & LinkedIn To Industry Pros Rarely Gets Results

Posted by Mike McCready | November 7th, 2015 | No responses

I get at least 100 emails each day from musicians like this one I received a few moments ago:

2.1 Million plays
Listen to I KNOW – R*ELL*****6 by R*ELL****6 #np on #SoundCloud
https://soundcloud.com/****l**6/i-know-r*****re***6

So, about once per week I click the link in one of the emails and I listen to the song. But it’s ALWAYS the same. A mediocre song (at best) with spoofed data. I only had to listen to 10 seconds to know there is no way that song legitimately got 2.1m plays. Note: I masked this artist’s identity because it’s not fair for me to call out a young musician who is just trying to make his way and who doesn’t know any better. But you get the point.

Most true artists would never do this. They would never spoof the data to make it look like the song or act has more traction than it really does because that’s the recipe for a bad reputation. It’s not professional.

But, there are many aspiring artists out there ‘hustling’ like that… to the point I can’t take any promo email seriously. I almost never click. And no one else in the industry takes them seriously either. And it’s the guys like this artist who ruin it for the deserving musicians like you probably are. Not only does he rip me off (my time) by lying to me about his song’s play-count just to get me to click, he rips off all the other aspiring talent who has music very deserving of attention because no one will click.

This happens in a lot of industries and people say a lot of things to get others to click. Everyone is desensitized. All those legitimate Nigerian princes can’t get a click because the fake ones are trying to take my money! 😉

So, to bring this around to how it relates to Music Xray, one can think of Music Xray’s submission fees as one would a freeway toll. It doesn’t only help pay for the upkeep of the road, it enables you to drive on one that isn’t congested with time-wasting traffic.

The tolls are just costly enough that guys like R***Y****6 will find it too expensive to stay on the road. He’ll be put in a position of either continuing to pay for rejection or to hit the exit ramps. While those who are getting great feedback from the industry and fans, are getting great Selection Prediction Scores, and are genuinely gaining traction, will find it very rewarding, will get heard, will get a shot with the knowledge that the professionals are listening.

Music Xray creates a similar environment for professionals, creating a competition among them for the top songs and talent while uncovering those ‘professionals’ who aren’t genuinely there to do real business and to truly find talent they want to work with. We remove those ‘professionals’ from the site if they happen to make it through our verification process in the first place, and we refund any artist who submitted to them.

Transparency and site integrity are our core values.

The Key To Understanding Music Xray is Understanding “Diagnostics”

Posted by Mike McCready | October 26th, 2015 | No responses

 

Music Xray’s primary job is to find the needles in the haystack. A needle is any song or act deserving of being selected for any opportunity throughout the industry. Diagnostics insures we gather the information to enable us to do our best.

What is Diagnostics? Diagnostics is a one-time per song purchase that costs $10 and must be purchased for each song that is submitted directly to any opportunity or any industry professional on the site. Once Diagnostics has been purchased for a song it becomes “Diagnostics Exempt” and may be submitted to an unlimited number of opportunities without ever being required to purchase Diagnostics again.

Diagnostics serves two purposes:

1. It tells you where your music stands compared to other music that may be competing for similar opportunities. It generates recommended next steps based on the industry and fan reaction. And perhaps most importantly, it shows you the likelihood your music will be selected for an opportunity via the site, assuming you employ a best-practices submission strategy.

2. It tells the industry where your music stands and how to find it. Because Diagnostics enables us to gather enough information about your music to make it easily searchable for industry professionals in our industry-only search & discovery engine called Needlestack. This increases the chances your music has of being discovered by industry professionals who conduct searches for music with specific characteristics, such as high production quality, interesting hooks, mood, topic, etc.

We cover both purposes in detail below.

Purpose 1: To tell you where your music stands…

See the key for each item below the graphic:

A. The number of professionals who have heard and rated this song (at least 5 professionals rate the song upon your first submission – serious professionals from among our over 1500 professional users currently seeking songs and talent, so if the song blows one of them away, a deal or relationship may ensue and often does).

B. The average of the ratings received from industry professionals.

C. Where the song stands among all other songs that have been rated on Music Xray (hundreds of thousands).

D. The percentage of potential fans who after hearing the song for the first time became a direct fan (which provides that fan’s email address and Facebook profile link to the musician). As part of your first transaction with us, we send the song to a pool of 20 potential fans we’ve identified based on the fan’s music taste. We have a pool of tens of thousands of fans (and growing fast) who have signed up on Music Xray to discover new bands and songs.

E. Typically, we target potential fans from that pool for you (when there’s a match between the song and the fan’s taste profile) for $0.33 per fan. If 100% of those fans convert to direct fans of yours, the cost per acquired fan would be $0.33, but at a 35% conversion rate, that cost is $0.92 per acquired fan. A 35% conversion rate is not bad at all! The cost reflected here is what real contactable fans will likely cost you if you were to continue targeting fans on Music Xray. It’s up to you to decide what is acceptable to pay per acquired fan, based on your ability to monetize their fan base.

F. Based on the information in A. B. C. D. & E., we tell you the likelihood your song will be selected for an opportunity on the site. To reach this result, Music Xray uses machine learning algorithms and statistical probability calculations. It also requires the artist to employ a “best practices submission strategy”. To learn what that is and how we calculate the results, click here.

G. Based on the information in A. B. C. D. & E., we provide recommended next steps for submissions to opportunities and the industry professionals behind them. If the results are not encouraging, we recommend not to submit the song to further opportunities and sometimes we recommend you get song help improving the song. We make many top industry professionals on the site available to offer song critiques and career coaching.

H. Based on the information in A. B. C. D. & E., we provide recommended next steps for fan acquisition. If the data is not encouraging, we often recommend not continuing using the song to acquire fans.

I. This is the song activity chart that tells you what is happening with your song on the site at any time. Did you acquire a new fan? Was your song heard by an industry professional? Was your song displayed in a search result etc.

Purpose 2: To make your music searchable for the industry…

Music Xray offers industry professionals access to a sophisticated search engine called Needlestack Music Search.

Every day professionals use this search engine to find the best new music on the site. They usually do this by first seeking certain characteristics such as mood or a certain lyric phrase, or bpm – which are things you enter as meta data for your song. But then they filter for quality, so they look for songs that at least a few industry professionals have heard and that obtain good ratings on things like composition, productions, and hit potential. Each professional can decide which attributes are important and adjust the filters accordingly to find they songs that match their criteria.

Most professionals set the filters in Needlestack to display only the songs that have been heard by at least 5 industry professionals.

In other words, if your song hasn’t been heard by at least 5 professionals, it is unlikely to be found. That’s why Diagnostics obtains 5 industry ratings for your song, upon your first transaction on the site. And this is showing results. About half the deals between artists and the industry on Music Xray occur due to Needlestack music search.

Below is an image of Needlestack. Notice the search criteria settings. This particular search is showing:

All the energetic pop songs sung by females with a BPM range between 10 and 300 that in the past month have been heard by at least 5 industry professionals and that have received average ratings of at least 4 out of 5 stars on all criteria (composition, production, arrangement, performance, and hit potential.

Show me all the energetic pop songs sung by females with a BPM range between 10 and 300 that have been heard by at least 5 industry professionals in the past week and that get an average rating of 4 out of 5 stars on all criteria.

Show me all the energetic pop songs sung by females with a BPM range between 10 and 300 that have been heard by at least 5 industry professionals in the past week and that get an average rating of 4 out of 5 stars on all criteria.

 

What Does A Record Producer Do?

Posted by Mike McCready | October 19th, 2015 | No responses

What does a record producer do?

Stuart Epps tells us.

According to Wikipedia, Stuart Epps is a British record producer and audio engineer.

Since 1967, he has worked with many artists, including: Elton John, Led Zeppelin, Oasis, Twisted Sister, Bill Wyman, Kiki Dee, George Harrison, Robbie Williams, Mark Owen, Paul Weller, Cliff Richard, Bad Company, Barry White and Chris Rea.

He has contributed to many records and has been associated with many popular hard rock records by such bands as Twisted Sister, Wishbone Ash, Bad Company, Vandenberg, The Firm, Jagged Edge UK and Shooting Star.

Besides his work with Led Zeppelin, Epps has been involved in other projects with their guitarist Jimmy Page as well as on many occasions with Rolling Stone member Bill Wyman.

He now dedicates his time to producing Independent artists and nurturing new talent.

Music Xray’s Twenty Submission Rule Of Thumb

Posted by Mike McCready | September 6th, 2015 | 2 Responses

As a user, you of course can decide how many industry submissions to make and to whom. However, keep the following in mind:

If you have great music, don’t give up too soon!

Music Xray's Selection Prediction Indicates a song's likelihood of being selected for by the industry an opportunity on Music Xray. It is based on the assumption that a song will be submitted to at least 20 opportunities.

Music Xray’s Selection Prediction Indicates a song’s likelihood of being selected for by the industry an opportunity on Music Xray. It is based on the assumption that a song will be submitted to at least 20 opportunities.

Even the best music gets rejected multiple times before sync deals are landed.

You know that, and if you don’t, check out the rejection letters at the bottom of this post.

While Music Xray can optimize your chances of having a song selected or landing a deal for your band, Music Xray doesn’t necessarily change the nature of the music business. More often than not, music is rejected. The music that gets selected was also initially rejected. It’s true in nearly every case. It is simply unreasonable to expect your song or band to land the deal you’re seeking without giving that song a reasonable chance.

Many musicians, with music that is deserving of a deal get frustrated too early. One or two labels and a couple of supervisors turn them down and they give up. And while we would love to provide you with a prediction score based on only 5 to 6 submissions – the fact is only a small amount of music gets selected after so few industry professionals hearing it. In order to provide any predictive accuracy, our system assumes the song will be shown to at least 20 professionals. To understand more about how we come up with the predictions, click here.

Twenty submisions may seem like a lot, but it’s important to put it into perspective. Never before in the history of the music business could anyone get their music in front of 20 real opportunities for anywhere close to the cost on Music Xray – both in terms of time and money. Even the methods that to you may feel free (like networking on Facebook & LinkedIn to find the opportunities) is very costly those methods don’t get all the other added benefits of Music Xray. Click here for some more perspective on that. Click here to understand some of the full benefits of Music Xray.

Click here to understand the traditional costs of getting your music heard.

Music Xray is a music industry filter, and by helping the industry identify the needles in the haystack we’re providing the best service possible to emerging artists, songwriters, producers, and musicians in general. Because we focus on being the best filter, Music Xray has many many MANY times the industry engagement of all the other sites that claim to do for musicians what Music Xray does.

So use negative feedback, ratings and Selection Prediction scores to make adjustments to your music and your submissions strategy. But if the reaction is positive, don’t give up too soon.

A rejection letter sent to Madonna

A rejection letter sent to Madonna

A rejection letter sent to Paul Hewson (aka Bono of U2).

A rejection letter sent to Paul Hewson (aka Bono of U2).

New Feature: Submission Dashboard for Artists

Posted by Mike McCready | August 10th, 2015 | No responses

Today we launch another feature – this one is for the artist community and it will help them keep better track of their submissions, instantly know if they’ve had previous interactions with a particular industry professional, and easily identify if submissions have been made to a particular opportunity.

You can see this dashboard (assuming you’ve made a submission or two already) by clicking here.

We hope you love it!

Screen Shot 2015-08-10 at 12.33.12 PM

Seeking Music for the film ‘Restore Me’ – Exclusive Music Xray placement

Posted by Mike McCready | August 2nd, 2015 | No responses

 

 

This post was originally published at myemail.constantcontact.com

I’m the lead music supervisor on the upcoming film Restore Me and I want to give an exclusive opportunity to Music Xray artists and composers (guaranteed placement). Please submit your best work for consideration.

Project: Restored Me (film) (IMDb Link)

A troubled ex-con joins the colorful crew of an old movie theater and begins to rebuild his life, only to find his faith is tested when he learns the theater he has grown to love is not what it seems.

Scene Description: Julio (main character) is at his job, the historic ‘Escalante Movie Theater’, having a conversation with a co-worker.

Song Description: Looking for a song (any genre) that will be playing through the PA speakers/system in the movie theater. Looking for lobby sounding music. Imagine the song being on a playlist on Spotify, not elevator music but more radio leaning. It can be an instrumental as well.

I try to keep these projects organized here on Music Xray so please submit to me here. Thanks.

GRAMMY Award winning music executive Amir Windom has experienced unprecedented career success. He recently became an Oscar nominee for his A&R; work on Pharrell’s international hit “Happy”.

Windom’s creative genius on Trey Songz, Kanye West, T.I. Lupe Fiasco and B.o.B’s albums always yield impressive results. He has also developed marketing campaigns for renown brands such as Adidas and Kodak.

Read More : myemail.constantcontact.com

Author : myemail.constantcontact.com

Do you want to pitch your songs DIRECTLY to Music Industry Pros? click here.