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.