Music Xray's Blog

Music Xray’s Revenue Grows 25% per Month as the Company Approaches Cash-flow Positive

Posted by Mike McCready | April 11th, 2012 | No responses

Sustained twenty-five percent monthly compounding revenue growth is not breakneck speed in the realm of booming digital businesses such as Pinterest or Instagram. But, it is very strong growth for a two-year-old music tech site like Music Xray and what’s more, we’re measuring growth in revenue dollars rather than number of free users joining the site. That’s a BIG difference. Music Xray’s user base, both industry professionals and musicians, is already on the larger side relative to those of other companies in the music tech space and is growing at a quick pace, too.

Obviously, this is an indication that we’re effectively solving a problem for both constituencies. A quick scan of tweets that mention “MusicXray” shows that our users carry our message forward and are finding the site very compelling. Our Facebook fan page is similarly filled with positive and sometimes embarrassingly gushing comments. Industry professionals are finding the songs and talent they’re seeking faster and more effectively than anywhere else and musicians are getting the deals and/or the feedback they need to get their careers to the next level. Our platform is transparent, straight-forward, and our customer service is second to none. Our pursuit of excellence is paying off and it’s very gratifying. We insist on providing solutions that work and that are clearly superior to any similar services.

But more importantly, and more interestingly to you, is that I think this says something important about the indie music space overall. Musicians are understanding that times have changed and that they need to invest in the advancement of their careers the same way they invest in recording great music. They are identifying the legitimate businesses that they find effective and they are counting Music Xray among them. We are thrilled and determined to continue to warrant the accolades.

We set out to re-imagine the A&R process, make it more fair and transparent, while at the same time improving accuracy, offsetting costs and saving time for industry professionals who earn their livelihoods with their ears. While our service is never complete, we have achieved the goal of being the best professional music filter / discovery platform that exists or has ever existed.

As we approach cash-flow positive in the very near future, we observe the landscape ahead. There are serious unresolved challenges musicians face that are not being addressed effectively by other companies and services. We plan to propose new ideas and introduce solutions while maintaining a laser-like focus on providing the tools to help professionals identify high potential songs and talent at the earliest possible stage.

As we progress through spring and summer, we’ll be reinforcing our New York office with more customer service and community management team members. We’ll be releasing new features and even a completely new service, about which we’re really excited! Stay tuned!

We want to say thank-you to all our users, especially the early adopters.

See how Music Xray works for musicians and songwriters.

See how Music Xray works for industry professionals.

by Mike McCready – Co-founder/CEO

Need a Refresher on How Music Xray Works?

Posted by Mike McCready | March 13th, 2012 | No responses

Hundreds of industry professionals log in every day and listen to the songs that have maintained high ratings after being heard by a few of their peers to whom you’ve submitted your songs.

That means that songs that get positive ratings get heard by more and more professionals and get multiple, ongoing shots at being offered a deal – at no further cost!

Click the image to see the quick video demo.

Are You an Industry Professional? See How Music Xray Changes the Game for You.

Posted by Mike McCready | March 7th, 2012 | No responses

Music Xray harnesses the collective filtering power of the music industry.

With over 1300 industry professionals screening and selecting the best of the best, there’s nothing and no one who can compete with Music Xray’s ability to help professionals identify high-potential songs and talent at the earliest stage possible.

Click the image to see the quick video demo.

Our new music search engine is powered by the collective filtering power of over 1300 industry professionals currently employed by top music companies. Find music (from among hundreds of thousands of tracks) for all your projects.

Posted by Mike McCready | January 12th, 2012 | 1 Response

No charge. No strings. No catches.

Click the video to play

No one has EVER harnessed the collective filtering power of over 1000 music industry professionals – until now.

We’re talking about professionals from places likeMTV, Columbia, RCA, Sire, Capitol, Universal Pictures & more.

Find music and talent for your projects.

We do not take a cut of any deal you do with the rights holders. Contact them directly when you find a track you want to use.

Open an account at Music Xray and start using the most powerful music search engine ever built.

Make your own catalog of music searchable.

Click the video to see how to get your music in the search engine.

Will they find your music? We’ll do our part. You do yours. It’s important.

Posted by Mike McCready | December 13th, 2011 | 6 Responses

Music Xray is preparing to launch a new music search engine to enable industry professionals to find your music via proactive searches – and everyone knows Music Xray is the only site where thousands of music industry professionals have active profiles and hundreds of them log in every day!

As we get closer to launch date, we’ll provide all the details regarding the new search engine.

In the meantime, it’s time to start sprucing up your profiles and your songs.

Enter your meta data for Music Xray’s new search engine

See the short video explaining how to enter your song data.

Please log in to your account, edit your songs and click the button that says “edit search related info“. Fill in as much of the requested information as you can.

It is also very helpful if you also add your lyrics since many professional seek music based on key phrases or song topics. All in all, the more complete your tracks’ profiles the better impression you make.

Log in here to get started.

Sharpening your music business skills – when to negotiate and when to sign on the dotted line

Posted by Mike McCready | December 7th, 2011 | No responses

Frequently, we receive inquiries from musicians who have had their song(s) selected for opportunities on Music Xray and who have questions about contract terms they’re being offered by the industry professionals.

One of the most frustrating occurrences is when an industry professional sends you a contract for license deal, you have some doubts and questions about the contract so you send your questions to the professional and then you never hear back. It’s like the deal just disappeared.

Why does this happen?

The hard reality is that while the license deal may be your first (or at least not the sort of thing you deal with every day), that’s not the case for many industry professionals. Many of them do license deals multiple times per week and many of them have successfully been using a similar contract template for years. It has been sufficient and deemed fair by many musicians who have gone before you so, for the professional, the contract is not a point of negotiation. Going back and forth on a standard contract is, in their minds, a waste of time. That’s why sometimes you may never hear back when you try to negotiate it. It’s just seen as too much hassle to discuss the finer points of a straightforward deal and it’s easier to move on and find alternative music.

Believe it or not, some industry professionals simply do not accept unsolicited material simply because they consider it to be too much effort to deal with artists who don’t demonstrate business competence. That is one of the primary reasons you should have a team that includes a manager. Seek one here (scroll to view all managers seeking to expand their rosters).

We’re not telling you to sign every deal put in front of you. Heavens no! You are right to have some healthy skepticism. We all know the reputation this business has earned. However, the web has made business a lot more transparent and it is getting a lot harder for anyone who is not ethical to hide their bad reputation. We urge you to check people out and do some reasonable research. We also urge you to negotiate the points of large complex agreements. You can also have a professional such as Desha Jackson review contracts for you at a very reasonable rate. But be careful not to become your own worst enemy when completing a deal.

The best next piece of good advice we can give you is to never stop learning how this evolving business works. As part of that endeavor, subscribe to our blog.

Music Xray’s policy regarding industry professional account suspension

Posted by Mike McCready | November 29th, 2011 | 2 Responses

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.

How much should you spend submitting your tracks via Music Xray? As little as possible.

Posted by Mike McCready | November 27th, 2011 | 5 Responses

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.

New Feature is like a GPS for your Music Career; are you getting closer to success or are you moving further away?

Posted by Mike McCready | November 23rd, 2011 | No responses

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?

Simply put: high ratings indicate a high probability your song or act will eventually be successful securing the type of deals you’re pursuing. Low scores mean it’s not likely to happen.

By showing you the average of several ratings, we’re not singling out any one of the professionals who rated. Their individual ratings are private. Therefore, they’re sincere. The knowledge you get from seeing these average ratings, previously cost months or even years to acquire.

You should learn the ratings of all your songs so that you know which ones gain traction for you and which ones may be holding you back.

Additionally, your songs that are receiving high ratings will continue to get pushed to the top of the statistics section, which is seen by dozens of industry professionals each day and it’s where they can hear top rated songs that have not been submitted directly to them but that are getting positive ratings from other industry professionals.

This eco-system that provides you feedback while you execute your submission strategy means the best way to use Music Xray is as follows:

1. Submit all your songs to at least 5 industry professionals (here’s a list of a few who ALWAYS rate the songs they receive.

2. Step one may result in your song getting a deal; in which case, misson accomplished. If not, once you have your 5 ratings for each song, you may regard it as a prediction of your eventual success.

3. Continue submitting the tracks that are receiving high ratings. Cease investing in your weaker songs and/or get professional song critiques and/or career coaching. After tweaking your music and/or your submissions strategy, go back to step one.

A focus group and a $4 credit for every new artist account

Posted by Mike McCready | November 17th, 2011 | No responses

Invite the musicians you know before someone else does!

You probably already know about Music Xray’s referral program where we pay you when people you refer to Music Xray conduct transactions.

Music Xray is growing quickly. Refer the musicians you know before someone else does.

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