I’ll just say it. Music Xray is hands down, far-and-away, no contest the best early stage song and talent discovery platform for music industry professionals. It’s not even close. If you are an industry professionals genuinely seeking to discover new, high-potential songs and talent and you aren’t using Music Xray to help you do it, you’re at a competitive disadvantage to all those who are using it to its fullest capabilities.

What’s more, it’s free. The only thing we require from our industry professional users is that you attend to every submission you receive within 30 days of receiving it. If you fall behind and submissions languish unattended in your drop box for 45 days or more, we’ll likely be suspending (shutting down) your account and locking you out.

It doesn’t have to happen. We give you the tools to regulate the pace of submissions. If you’re getting so many that you can’t keep up, you can raise your submission fee. If you’re getting too few, you can decrease it.

We will make exceptions. For example, if you’re going on an extended vacation or if you’re on maternity leave, we’ll work with you. You can also deactivate your drop box without having your account suspended. To do that, just attend to all the pending submissions and then set your drop box to expire on today’s date or any date you desire. That will mean that you will not receive any more submissions until you re-open the drop box (or create a new one) and your account will remain open.

Music Xray’s musician and songwriter users depend on the fact that every submission they make will be heard and attended to by the people to whom they submit their music. If you aren’t keeping up, we must remove you and cut off your access to our A&R tools.

Unattended open drop boxes on Music Xray are not allowed.

That’s right. I don’t think you should spend any more than it absolutely takes to achieve your goals (land the sort of deals you’re pursing). The shorter we can make the path and the more we can reduce costs, the more invaluable Music Xray will be to our community of musicians. Ultimately, we care most about building the best set of tools we possibly can.

So, I want to be clear about this. You should not spend a penny more than the value Music Xray provides to your career.

As you know, each time one of your tracks has been rated by five industry professionals (which requires that you submit the track at least five times) we show you the average of the ratings. We don’t delay showing you the ratings as part of some strategy to get you to submit each song five times. It’s just that the average of any number of ratings below five is not statistically significant and doesn’t provide reliable information.

We can’t show you each individual rating. If we did, the ratings would be less sincere because the professionals who rate the songs would know that their individual ratings are public. As much as we’d like that fact to not influence the scores, it does.

So, here’s the thing: we’ve been collecting song ratings from industry professionals for years and we reflect those results back to the community of professionals. More on how that works here. We simply decided that it might be useful to you if we showed those ratings to you.
So, we worked out a way that we could do that without singling out any individual professional who rated a song. We don’t charge you anything additional to see the ratings. Consider it a bit of a bonus.

But then we realized that the ratings themselves are predictive in nature. That is, we can observe that most songs that receive high ratings do end up landing the type of deal they’re pursuing sooner or later. Often, it’s just a matter of persistence and having a good submissions strategy – which most often just means not submitting to opportunities that aren’t a good fit for your music. I don’t think anyone should submit solely for the purpose of acquiring a rating (unless you’re submitting specifically to get some career coaching or a song critique – in which case, getting the feedback is the whole purpose of the submission).

Given that the scores are predictive, we realized that one of the best ways to use Music Xray is to actually submit all the music you have to as many opportunities as it takes to accumulate five ratings for each song. In the process, you may get a deal for a few of those songs right away. It happens all the time. But if not, you can use the ratings you get back to decide which songs you want to continue submitting and which songs are probably not worthy of your continued investment.

Either way, you and your team have to decide how much you should invest in getting your career to the next level. At what point is it not worth it? You also music consider the fact that every deal you don’t land, someone else does. Competition is tough and in order to not be out-competed in the new music business, you have to use tools, like those provided by Music Xray, in a way that increases your chances and gives you an edge.

We’re very excited that today we have launched a new feature. The feature itself is just a small change to how Music Xray has always worked but it changes the game for musicians and songwriters everywhere because it provides you feedback as you execute your submission strategy.

It’s like a GPS system to tell you if you’re getting closer or further away from getting a deal for your music or your band.

It also creates a new, very effective way to use Music Xray to advance your music career.

When musicians submit tracks to industry professionals for their consideration, the professionals are asked to rate them. Many of them do. They give the songs one to five stars on each of the following criteria: composition, production, performance, arrangement, and hit potential.

As of today, Music Xray shows you your track’s average ratings once your track has been rated at least five times. Why is that important?

Invite the musicians you know before someone else does!

Musicians should have at least one person on their team responsible for turning their efforts into a business.

It’s not just about securing deals and fans. It’s about making sure those actions create an ongoing revenue stream.

Being creative, writing music, recording, & playing gigs requires a lot of time and effort. To really boost your career, find a good manager (start here), a good coach (start here), or a good producer who can help you begin to see yourself as a business.

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