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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:

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

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

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).

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

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 Enables Companies to Add Signature “Song-to-Opportunity Matching” Feature to Their Offering: Releases Developer API for Music Libraries, Music Sites, & Other Music-Related Companies

Posted by Mike McCready | May 19th, 2012 | 1 Response

S₂O stands for Song-to-Opportunity, and matching songs to real industry opportunities is what Music Xray does. We use some clever acoustic matching technology developed by our partners at Queen Mary University in London. Here’s how we apply it…

Many of the industry professionals who use Music Xray to find new songs and talent have a pretty specific idea of what they’re seeking. For example, the music supervisor of a new movie might think that “Brown Sugar” by Rolling Stones would be perfect for one of the scenes, but they can’t secure that license, or can’t afford it.

Music Xray enables the music supervisor to actually upload a file of “Brown Sugar” to a section of their dashboard. The Queen Mary-developed software analyses the acoustic properties in “Brown Sugar” and then Music Xray alerts every independent musician in our system who has a similar sounding track and points them toward the music supervisor’s drop box where they can pay a few dollars to submit their track for consideration. As per our policy, we guarantee the supervisor listens to AND responds to every submission. In the end, a track is chosen and a deal is done between the supervisor and the rights holder of the track.

Hundreds of opportunities of this type exist on Music Xray on any given day and are continuously filled and new ones are continuously posted.

Obviously, not every independent track is in our system. In fact, the only tracks in our system are those that have been uploaded to Music Xray by the artists and rights holders themselves. There are all sorts of music sites out there, providing excellent services to musicians and we’d like to partner with them all in a way that just works, generates revenue for the partner sites and increases the feature set of those partner sites by adding Music Xray’s Song to Opportunity (S₂O) Matching system to their platforms.

By integrating with Music Xray’s API, partner sites can alert their musician members any time one of their tracks matches an opportunity on Music Xray. If that match results in the musician submitting their song for consideration, Music Xray pays the partner site some money. Tracking and crediting of the payment are automatic and even if the musician doesn’t open an account on Music Xray right away, Music Xray remembers by whom that potential user was referred, even months down the line.

If you run a website dedicated to providing services to musicians and those musicians have uploaded music to your site, you are an ideal potential user of Music Xray’s API. You can build it into your site as deeply as you’d like. You can do it in a way that alerts your users via email that they have opportunity matches or you can build it in to display the matched opportunities on a musician’s dashboard – or any other implementation idea you have.

Please see the documentation and integration instructions here, and/or get in touch with us for any help you need during the implementation.

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:

See You Tonight by Kotadama

First Move by The Branded

Impossible by Diamante

Oh No by Derrty Zo

Call Me Crazy by Gliffics

When You Come Home by Lynx ft Mystery Lady

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

The Ins & Outs of Submission Fees on Music Xray

Posted by Mike McCready | July 5th, 2011 | 4 Responses

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!

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