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What happens when you submit a song via Music Xray?

Posted by Mike McCready | July 19th, 2012 | 10 Responses

 

Here at Music Xray, we’re all about transparency and about managing expectations. Sometimes people ask why they occasionally get the same response from different music industry professionals. So, we thought we’d take this opportunity to peek behind the curtain.

 

When an industry professional receives a song, they can hear the track, read any lyrics you’ve uploaded, read your bio, see your video (if you have one), check your Next Big Sound statistics, view the rest of your profile and songs on Music Xray (if they choose) and then, they are presented with three choices: Select, Hold, and Not Select.

 

Obviously, the more information you fill out in your song presentation profiles, the better impression you make with industry professionals.  You should always include your lyrics, a photo or an image and even a video if you have one. You should always put your best foot forward.

 

Select: If your song is selected, you are alerted via email that your song has been selected and a pathway to communicate with the industry professional is opened. That allows you to begin a dialog and to close the deal. It’s important however to be respectful, patient, and courteous.  You would be surprised to learn how many deals go south after a song has already been selected simply due to the industry professional deciding they’d rather not work with the artist. Remember, there are a lot of songs and artists out there, and while you should seek and expect a good deal, being “easy to work with” and “low maintenance” goes a long way.

 

Hold: This simply means the industry professional has put their decision on hold. You are free to continue to submit your song elsewhere. When your song is on hold, the industry professional will receive an email every 10 days reminding them they have your song on hold and that you are awaiting a final decision. Keep in mind that songs can remain on hold for a long time. This is especially true in television and film.  It can take 18 months sometimes between when music supervisors begin looking for music and when the movie is done and final music selection begins.

 

Not Select: When an industry professional does not select a song, they are prompted with the screen you see in the image to the right. There, they can write their own reason for not selecting the song, or they can choose from one of the standard, but polite responses we provide. We provide these short answers because they are typical reasons songs are often not selected and part of what makes our system so appealing to industry professionals is that we make it so quick and easy.

 

We acknowledge that such a short response can sometimes be underwhelming to the submitter. It’s important to remember that before Music Xray, getting a guaranteed listen from an industry professional much less a response of any kind was unheard of. We will continue to make improvements where / as we can.  In the meantime, if you’re seeking a longer and more detailed response to your song, we provide you a way to submit to industry professionals for song critiques and career coaching.  When you submit to those drop boxes, you can expect much more detailed responses and perhaps even enter a dialog with the professional on the other side.

 

Once the industry professional has made their choice, we show them the next screen where they are asked to rate your song on each of five separate criteria.  These ratings do not go directly back to you because we’ve found that industry professionals may sugar-coat their ratings if they know you will see them. Instead, we show you the average of the ratings once your song has been submitted to five separate opportunities and five professionals have rated your song.

 

That way, no industry professional is singled out for their rating and we feel an average of five ratings gives you an accurate reflection of how your track is being received by the industry. If you don’t like the ratings you’re receiving, you must face the fact that the ratings come from professionals you’ve selected.  Presumabaly they are into your style and genre or you would not have submitted your music to them in the first place. It’s kind of hard to argue that the ratings aren’t an accurate reflection of how your music is perceived. If your ratings are good, keep submitting. If they are bad, consider getting some help from other industry professionals or consider submitting another track in the future.

Lastly, the ratings are used by the industry professionals themselves. They can log in to the “collective ratings” section of their account and see the ratings of all the other professionals and they can adjust the filters to suit what they are seeking.  For example, they can adjust the filters to show them all the songs that have been reviewed and rated by at least 10 other industry professionals in the past month. They can also adjust the filters to show them only the songs that get high ratings on certain criteria. If hit potential isn’t important to a particular industry professional, they can adjust
the filter to disregard hit potential as a search criteria.

This feature enables the industry professionals to leverage each others’ filtering capability and expertise. Many of the deals that get done on Music Xray are a direct result of professionals finding the tracks they are seeking in this section, so for you, having multiple good ratings from five or more industry professionals can be the key to getting contacted when you least expect it. This is called “crowd-sourcing” and Music Xray is the only company to ever have successfully crowd-sourced the music industry. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. Industry professionals visit this section of the site daily to scoop the cream off the top.

So, there you go… a peek behind the curtain at Music Xray. I hope this was interesting and helpful. If it was, please click the little Facebook “like” button below or the share options and help us spread the word.

 

Thanks,

Mike McCready

Co-founder & CEO

Music Xray

 

How much time & effort do you spend acquiring new fans?

Posted by Mike McCready | July 17th, 2012 | 6 Responses

 

How much time and money do you spend trying to acquire new fans online?  Think about it. Remember, while you’re doing it, you have to feed yourself and you have to pay rent. Time is money.

 

Now ask yourself, do you enjoy the process? Do you ever get the feeling people aren’t just waiting around for you to tell them about a new song you’ve recorded? It can be hard to break through all the noise just to get the attention of potential fans, right?

 

Identifying, engaging, and monetizing new fans is one of the hardest tasks musicians face and it’s why we’ve built a new service within Music Xray called Fan Match.

 

In short, it matches you and your music with likely fans.

 

Be one of the first to try this new service. We’ve got 150 slots open.

 

Thousands upon thousands of music fans are already part of Music Xray. We initially opened Music Xray to fans a couple years ago when we needed random music lovers to participate in focus groups. We know all about their tastes and a lot of their demographic information.

 

 

So, here’s how Fan Match works:

 

  1. You choose a song you’d like people to hear.

    2.  

  2. For every dollar you pay us, we guarantee three potential fans will hear your track.

    3.  

  3. Upon hearing your track they can decide if they want to become a direct fan of yours (in which case you get their email address and can establish a direct relationship with them just like all your other fans).

    4.  

  4. Upon hearing your track, they can also decide to tip you.

    5.  

 

How do you know if this is a good service and if it’s worth it?

 

Let’s say you spend $100 today to acquire new fans (via any method you choose). Can you guarantee that 300 new people will hear your music? Not just any new people; but people who are into your style and genre and who are open to hearing and discovering new songs and bands.

 

Can you do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day? It takes a lot of work.

That’s why we thought someone should build a better way.

 

Look, if only 10% of the new people who hear your music decide they really like it enough to offer you their email address; well, that’s 30 new fans with whom you would then have a direct relationship. Divide that into $100 and it comes out to having cost you $3.33 per new fan.

If 20% decide to give you their email address, then it will have cost you only $1.66 per new fan.

So, logically, the more compelling your music is, the more fans you’ll convert from among the 300 we target for you. The more fans you acquire, the less it’s costing you per fan. Thus the correlation is that the better your music is, the more fans you’ll acquire for less money.

Plus, you might even inspire some of those fans to tell their friends and jump-start your own little organic unit. It’s a new product. We don’t want to oversell it. At the same time, we think itless it will cost you to acquire a new fan. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that some of those new fans will tell their friends and bring you even more fans, giving you more bang for your buck.

How much is each fan worth to you in the first year? What about over the lifetime of the relationship? How many CDs, downloads, t-shirts, and tickets to your gigs do you have to sell each one before you make back that $3.33 (assuming you only converted 10% of those who heard your music)? You would probably make that back plus a lot more fairly soon, wouldn’t you?  And some of those fans will last a lifetime and pay you again and again over the course of your career.

 

But then, let’s consider this… what if we can encourage one of every ten fans you acquire to give you a tip. Not much; maybe only a dollar.  So, for every 30 fans you acquire, you might make $3 in tips.  Lets do that math.

 

$100 cost to acquire 30 fans

minus $3 in tips

equals $97 (the true cost of acquiring the fans)

 

See how the tips offset your costs?  What if your music were so good it inspires fans to give you more than $100 in tips? Suddenly, your fan acquisition costs went down to nothing.

 

But, for the purposes of this exercise, let’s stick with a more probable reality and say it will cost $3 per each fan acquired. Remember, this will depend on how compelling your music is.

 

Can you do that for less anywhere else? If so, you should. If you can’t, it would be a bad decision not to use Fan Match and any other musicians who target the same audience as you would be getting an advantage over you by using Fan Match if you aren’t.

 

Here’s the kicker. If your music is really, really good you can acquire fans for less than other musicians. If it’s not as compelling as it could be, you won’t acquire as many fans per dollar spent. But you’ll never know your cost per fan until you try Fan Match and if you don’t know what it costs to acquire a fan, you don’t know if you can even make a living as a musician.

 

Fan Match can be an indicator of your viability as a business. It can predict your ability to make a living while at the same time helping you do so.

 

Be one of the first to try this new service. We’ve got 150 slots open.

 

See the video below for a succinct explanation of how Fan Match works.  And please help us get this information out there by clickingthe “like” button below the video or the “share” feature.

 

 

 

 

 

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

A refresher on how Music Xray merged a few features to create the world’s best song and talent filter

Posted by Mike McCready | February 8th, 2012 | No responses

Step 1: Open a free account as an artist and upload your music (or select the option for us to import it for you from Soundcloud or other sites).

·As soon as your music is in the system, you will receive an email for each song letting you know if there are currently any industry professionals on Music Xray actively seeking songs like yours. We use acoustic similarity software to do this. You can read more about it here.

·We then send you one email per week if there have been any changes (if any industry professional has started or stopped seeking songs like yours). 

 

·We also alert you when your songs have been displayed in search results (we have an awesome search engine used by many of the 1300 industry professionals with active accounts). 

· If your songs are being passed over, we help you understand why. 

· We also send you an email each week listing all the new opportunities that have opened on the site in the previous 7 days. 

Yeah. That’s all free. 

Step 2: Submit your best track to a few industry professionals. We give you a $4 credit so you don’t pay the first time.

· Submit your music to be considered for any of the opportunities you see by browsing the site or by referencing the emails you’ve received that have matched your songs to specific opportunities. 

·Although some industry professionals have a higher submission fee than others, we give you a $4 credit. In many cases, that will make your first submission at no cost. 

Step 3: Your music is heard and responded to (GUARANTEED)- and you may land one of the deals with no further action.

Landing a deal at this stage is very common. You can read some success stories here.

You can ask users hanging out on our Facebook page.

Or read our blog for tips and information. 

Then what happens?

Regardless of whether or not your song is chosen, the industry professional will rate your song. 

After your song has five ratings (from 5 separate submissions to five professionals of your choice), we show the average ratings to you. 

The ratings are like a fortune predictor. 

High ratings mean you’re likely on your way to a deal and that even if your song has not yet been selected, keep submitting. It’s probably only a matter of time. 

We also show well-rated songs to the entire community of industry professionals.


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! 

Ratings not going so well? Don’t worry. We know some people who can help.

If the ratings you’re getting from professionals aren’t as positive as you’d hoped, don’t worry. We give you access to Grammy-winning producers, hit songwriters and a few celebrity artists who will give you honest feedback, advice and tips regarding your music and your submission strategy. 

Even musicians at the peak of their career continue to seek coaching. We make it easily accessible. 

Did we mention the focus group? Yeah. That’s free too.

We enable you to conduct a free focus group with 25 random music fans giving their feedback on any one of your tracks. 

Lastly, keep all your rights. Keep all your revenue on deals you get. No strings! No catches!

Sign up is completely free

See what all the buzz is about with no cost to you. Simply click the button to get up and running in less than 5 minutes

Sign up now

And/Or…

Get our free weekly opportunity email

 

 

Harness the collective filtering power of the music industry

Posted by Mike McCready | January 25th, 2012 | No responses

Know how Music Xray works

Check out our new video to see how we harness the collective filtering power of the music industry.

Click the video to play

 

Feedback about Music Xray from industry professionals is “off the hook”!

Posted by Mike McCready | January 17th, 2012 | 2 Responses

As you, no doubt, know by now, we launched our new search engine last week.

Feedback from industry professionals about their experience discovering new songs and talent on Music Xray has been very positive – but last week we took it to a whole new level. We are never satisfied and continue to make improvements but we’re proud of what we’ve built and to share some of the feedback with you.

Mia Bajin said, “New features on the website are off the hook! Thumbs up!”

John Kuhns, Program Director of Suckfree Radio has been using the Song to Opportunity Match (S2O) to help him find artists on Music Xray and he is truly happy with this service. Here is what he has to say:

“Oh my God! I just had the most incredible afternoon listening to some amazing new music!”

“I have been using Music X-ray for about a year and a half and have heard some talented artists, but I finally decided to take the time to fully explore the S2O technology. I would recommend it to any A&R and Music Placement Professionals that are feeling burned out listening to that stack of unsolicited CDs taking up space on their desks.”

Recent standouts added to the Suckfree Radio playlist include:

Alex Hirsch – Brown, Byrd & Champagne – Disastroid – Lc Johnson – Stevie Hawkins – Seven Weapons

“I listened to several of these submissions 2 or 3 times simply because they definitely don’t suck!”

 

Read success stories here.

 

 

Music Xray gets closer to a new search engine for music industry professionals to find your music. Make sure all your music is uploaded to the site.

Posted by Mike McCready | December 28th, 2011 | 1 Response

 

Music Xray has released a next generation music search engine for industry professionals.

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.

See the video for an overview of how Music Xray works.

 

Log in here to get started.

 

Check out last week’s opportunity email and the latest success stories!

Posted by Mike McCready | October 19th, 2011 | No responses

 


Be sure to check out last week’s opportunity email here. It continues to get a lot of buzz.

Also, see the latest Music Xray artists getting backed with $100,000 budgets!

Read some success stories.

 

 


Sign-up to receive a music industry opportunity email like this one each week

Click here to sign-up

Can You Predict A Hit? The 21st Century A&R Answer

Posted by Mike McCready | October 11th, 2011 | No responses

On Saturday October 1st, Bob Lefsetz asked this question in his post located here.

I have dedicated the past 10 years (of my 20 in this business) to precisely this question – or as I ask it now, “How can we make the A&R process more efficient and more accurate?”

On this subject – the data-driven question of “can you predict a hit” –  I’ve put in my 10,000 hours and then some. Speaking of which, here’s an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s article on my work in this field from The New Yorker (October 2006). Here’s me discussing this type of work with Gladwell at the New Yorker Conference in 2007. Here’s an sinopsis of an episode of the CBS series Numb3rs that used our research and technology as inspiration for their entire story line (if you only check out one of these links, check out that one). Lastly, this is a link to the Harvard Business School case study done on our work in this field.

I could go on. The work has been featured in numerous documentaries from BBC to Discovery to NatGeo and so on…

In 2001, I joined forces with a smart, family-owned software company outside Barcelona, Spain that had come up with a technology (at the time it was cutting-edge) that could analyze the acoustic properties and underlying mathematical patterns in music. Together, we started a company called Polyphonic HMI and began trying to sell a music recommendation system to music retailers. Digital retail did not exist so we were trying to sell it to Best Buy, Tower, Sam Goody etc. Our only true competition was a small start-up called Savage Beast from Silicon Valley. They were using people to classify songs instead of computers, however.

We were both too early to market and we both nearly went bankrupt. Savage Beast went back to the drawing board, changed their name to Pandora and the rest is history. We went back to the drawing board and came up with a service called Hit Song Science. We realized that making a prediction about the music someone would likely enjoy based upon their favorite songs was only slightly different than making a prediction about what music an entire market would enjoy based upon what it had proven to enjoy in the past – i.e. hit songs.

After months of fine-tuning, the technology worked pretty well when used properly. It had its limitations but if you took those into account, you could glean some really good data that really helped choose the single on an album that would likely encounter the least market resistance when promoted on par with all the other singles being promoted contemporaneously.

Mike McCready & Malcolm Gladwell

In short, we determined, within reasonable margins of error, that most hit songs (even in brand new genres) conform to predictablepatterns – concrete combinations of melody, harmony, beat, tempo, rhythm, octave, pitch, chord progression, fullness of sound, cadence, sonic brilliance etc. Songs that sound like hits to the human ear but that do not match one of the common “hit song patterns” face much steeper market resistance than those that do. I recognize there is much additional data that could be observed (as per Lefsetz’ post) but this is where we started.

A few labels embraced the service and tried to use it as we’d intended. We built up a nice little consulting business but it was nothing that was ever going to explode into a mass-scale sort of endeavor. In his book about WMG, Stan Cornyn remarked that in the race to adopt new technology, the music industry finishes just ahead of the Amish.

While that may be an exaggerated truth, I’m sure I had my shortcomings when it came to evangelizing Hit Song Science. So, I lay no blame with the market. But most frustrating was that so many labels, instead of working with us to try to harness the power of the technology to improve their business, would either spend time trying to disprove it worked by “tricking” the technology (not hard to do) or to use our reports to cover their asses – using them in internal meetings when our reports supported what they already believed or hiding them in a drawer when they did not. Rarely were we able to show a significant impact on a label’s bottom line after consistent use of Hit Song Science over time. The technology was rarely used to help make business and promotion decisions.

Yes, we should have just started our own label, yada yada, but we weren’t able to raise that kind of capital at the time and we weren’t that kind of company. All of that is covered in the HBS case study so I won’t re-hash it here.

In late 2005, I left Polyphonic HMI and in 2006 I co-founded Music Xray. Music Xray, while not sold as a technology service is a continuation of my vision for improving the efficiency and accuracy of the A&R process. Music Xray is an online A&R platform – currently the ONLY online platform specialized in A&R.

We called it Music Xray because we wanted to make the point that any kind of skill-enhancing technology is just a tool. Hit SongScience was never trying to replace human ears and ten-thousand-hour-earned gut instinct with a computer. Music Xray, like the medical x-ray, is just a tool that helps professionals make better decisions by adding never-before available data to the process. The medical x-ray doesn’t replace the doctor but few of us would consider visiting a doctor who refuses to use an x-ray machine when appropriate. Not using the best available data in the music business could also be considered malpractice but since lives are not on the line (just livelihoods and careers) there is no external pressure in our industry to adopt these kinds of best-practices. In fact, there is more industry-recognized glory when you can attribute success to elusive golden ears and gut instinct  – much like the mystique surrounding a professional athlete.

Only when not using empirical data creates a competitive disadvantage do we see mass-adoption.

To that end, when we finally built a service and a business model that aligns with the clear self interests of all the parties (musicians and music industry professionals) it works remarkably well and today, Music Xray is becoming widely used – although a bit still under the radar.

We call Music Xray a 21st century A&R platform.  It is free for music industry professionals to use. The small fees we charge musicians to have their music considered for deals achieves results they could not achieve at any price, in most cases, and it saves months of work and thousands of dollars for those few musicians who actually could achieve the results on their own. In fact, in the past 6 months alone, Music Xray has helped musicians place (and the industry find) over 3500 songs and acts to be used in commercial and exposure deals. These include major and indie label signings, songs placed in major motion pictures, network and cable TV series etc. We get daily love letters from both industry professionals and musician users. It’s very rewarding and the company is growing robustly (whew!).

I believe that as long as commercial and exposure opportunities for music exist, there will be human gatekeepers making decisions regarding which songs and acts are chosen. They will use data-driven tools to help make the decisions and Music Xray seeks to provide some of the best decision-making tools that enhance golden ears and gut instinct. To use a NASCAR metaphor, we build the best race car; one that enhances a driver’s natural talent and skill and we make the race car available for free. It’s a no-brainer to take it for a test drive if A&R is part of your business.

As an A&R platform, Music Xray is now used by over 1300 industry professionals and organizations including major labels, MTV, dozens of independent labels, publishers, radio stations, producers and even a few influential music bloggers. Some of our tools include an unique song-to-opportunity matching system and the ability for professionals to harness each others’ ears and expertise: like crowd-sourcing – except the crowd is formed by individuals who make their living with their ears. We continue to roll-out data-driven tools that help professionals find the highest potential songs and acts to fit each unique opportunity (not just finding hit singles).

A by-product of this system is that we observe (and share the data back to our community) each touch-point between the professionals and songs and acts on the platform. Each day we can identify numerous songs and acts that have been evaluated favorably by multiple A&R professionals but that remain available. In short, all the professionals can observe what’s “trending” among their industry peers. That is something that never before has been possible to know. For example, last week, these were some of the trending songs in pop across a wide swath of the industry:

Financially successful artists will never truly be DIY. They will always need someone on the team responsible for turning it all into a business. We build the tools to make that process more efficient and more accurate – increasing the chances of success for everyone.

So, it turns out that it’s not just about hit prediction. Often, it’s just about finding the right song for the right opportunity – a sort of Match.com for the music business.

by Mike McCready, Co-founder & CEO of Music Xray

Special Announcement: Let’s blow Jay’s doors off with great singles!! He’s signing!!

Posted by Mike McCready | October 8th, 2011 | No responses

Jay Frank, former Yahoo Music executive and former MTV executive officially launches today a SINGLES ONLY label. Send him your best singles today exclusively through Music Xray.

With a focus on artist-friendly deals, smart marketing budgets, and deep industry connections, DigSin artists are positioned for greatness with more flexibility than other labels

DigSin is a singles label that uses new, targeted digital marketing techniques to build audiences. Founded by Jay Frank, author of the top digital songwriting book Futurehit.DNA, DigSin finds the best songs by the best new artists that are well suited for a career launch around their very best songs!