The music business has changed in countless ways over the past decade. It’s only natural that the A&R / professional-talent-discovery process would change as well. None of what is written here is theory. It is working in practice and thousands of songs and acts are selected for opportunities.

Let’s remember for a moment what it used to be like for industry professionals:

A&R professionals limited their intake of new music to trusted contacts and their referrals. Even so, they listened to large amounts of music. They had to keep track of who submitted what, deal with overflowing and sluggish email accounts and/or stacks of CDs. Often, they were relentlessly pursued, hounded, called, emailed, ambushed and otherwise hunted down by almost everyone from whom they’d received music for their consideration. These and other issues involving legal concerns were precisely what led so many companies to actually close their doors to submissions from people with whom they didn’t already have working relationships. These inefficiencies and policies of not accepting unsolicited material shut out countless independent musicians, deprived the industry and audiences of some very worthwhile music, and created a community that operated, to a large degree, based on who you knew or could get access to.

The Music Xray Way

Music Xray has implemented a way that enables over 1200 music industry professionals (and growing) to open the doors of opportunity to independent musicians everywhere. Submission fees are an integral part of it but they do not exist as a significant revenue stream for any industry professional. In fact, many of them direct their fees to various charities. You can read more about that here.

The submission fees serve as a barrier to avoid submission overflow. The industry professionals on Music Xray can raise or lower the fees as needed to speed up or slow down the rate at which they are receiving submissions. Music Xray requires the professionals to listen to and attend to every submission. If they fall too far behind, we suspend their account and they loose the ability to use the highly useful A&R tools provided on our site. Due to the fact that they must attend to every submission, they cannot afford to receive so many songs that they can’t keep up. The fee-barrier helps them keep things manageable.

You participate in the A&R process:

The fee also requires the musicians to participate in the A&R process. If you see an opportunity on the site in which you are interested and you feel like your song is up to par, you will likely make the submission. However, if you weigh the cost of the submission versus the strength of your song and decide not to make the submission, you are in fact helping the industry pre-screen by taking your song out of consideration. If you don’t feel your song is strong enough, it’s likely the A&R professional would agree with you. By not submitting, you are increasing the chances of those who do submit, decreasing the amount of inappropriate music the professional must hear and making the A&R process more efficient.

By the same token, the fee helps the songs you do submit not be drowned in a sea of songs that other musicians have opted not to submit. The fees are a very useful tool in the pre-screening process.

What the fees are not:

Music Xray does not permit industry professional to use the fees as a significant revenue stream nor to pay for prizes in a contest-type scenario. Exceptions are made for professionals who use the fees to help offset the costs of screening and for industry professionals who are providing career coaching or song critiques. They should be paid for their time and expertise just as are attorneys, tax professionals and other types of consultants. We let them set their own price and we allow the market to determine if they are worth it.

Music Xray closes down accounts of professionals who are discovered to be hosting false opportunities. Our team vets each professional and each opportunity but we also rely on community policing. We enable our community of musicians to leave comments (positive and negative) on the profile pages of the industry professionals. It helps keep everyone on their best behavior.
Music Xray refunds money to submitters when too much time has gone by without a response (usually 45 days).

The responsibilities of the musicians in today’s music industry:

As companies have left the role of artist development, that responsibility is increasingly falling on the shoulders of the musicians themselves, their immediate business teams and their financial backers if they have them.
To be an artist (performer or songwriter or both) in today’s ecosystem requires you to think of yourself as a small business. When businesses spend money to develop new products and services they spend even more marketing and selling them. They make sure their customers get a taste. They spend money on advertising, they give away free samples, they spend money on trade shows, business trips, negotiations… In short, they spare no expense when it comes to getting the deals that generate the revenue and eventual profit.

Most musicians “get” that and they actually do those things. They just do them in the ways they’ve always been done – ways that seem free but actually have huge costs in time and effort which also translate to money.
Music Xray provides a place where you can get that done in a way that costs less in terms of both time and money. Music Xray is a money and time SAVER for you, not an additional cost. It should decrease the amount of money already spent trying to get deals and significantly increase the effectiveness of your efforts.

Circumvention of Music Xray’s platform

We understand that accepting submission fees is difficult for a process that seemed free in the past (but really wasn’t) so we know how desirable it can seem to want to avoid the fee and find another way to contact the industry professionals. Because this happens from time to time, some industry professionals on the site refuse to be identified. They get too many email submissions and it defeats the purpose of being able to use our great A&R tools that help them find what they are seeking and keep everything organized. Many of them just forward those submissions to us and we’ll contact you and suggest you use their Music Xray drop box and we will probably send you a link to this post (awkward!)

But it just doesn’t make sense to circumvent the system. Here’s why:

When you submit through Music Xray, you know the person on the other end is going to listen to the song and you’re not going to have to call-in a favor or pester someone to make sure that happens. Whenever you send an MP3 via email or a CD via the post you don’t really know for sure if they listen and then you find yourself either feeling crappy because you never hear back or feeling crappy because you have to call back and hound them about the song – and if you’re like us you probably hate being that person.

With Music Xray, you know that if they don’t listen, our community managers are just going to have to contact them to tell them we’re closing their account because they are not attending to their submissions. We have leverage you don’t.

So, if you are making submissions and not getting selected, you just have to live with the fact that your music isn’t grabbing their attention despite being listened to or you have to get better by maybe getting some professional critiques and some coaching – also available on the site.

This is not theory

None of this is theory. It is working in practice and due to Music Xray’s innovative A&R tools and platform, over 1200 industry professionals use Music Xray to conduct some or all of their A&R efforts and over 2500 songs and acts have been selected for opportunities  – and that’s just since February!