Mike McCready

If you’ve been in the music industry for long you probably get asked all the time to listen to new music, provide career advice, critique songs, make introductions and promote artists within the industry to your network of colleagues and contacts; a network that has taken you years of hard work to build.

As you know, it’s hard enough to get traction for music you absolutely love and in which you have a vested interest but it can be simply awkward when an artist you know and like but whose music isn’t compelling is asking you to introduce them to someone in your network. You feel somewhat obligated but you know that each time you cash in an introduction you are spending the good will and personal capital you’ve built up. If the person you send the music to doesn’t like it, you also damage your credibility for the next time you pass some music along.

This is one of the toughest issues all music industry professionals (MIPs) deal with. I talk with MIPs all the time who tell me they get cornered by their friends who want them to come over to their house and listen to their high school kid perform or they get handed CDs and sent MP3 to the point they can’t even keep track of them let alone listen to and review them. It’s not only the labels that get overwhelmed with submissions. It’s anyone who might have a contact at a label, with a top producer, a music supervisor or who has worked in the music scene and has a professional opinion that can help someone. One guy told me, “I have a friend who is an accountant but he doesn’t review my taxes as a favor. He gets paid a lot of money for his professional advice but people always want mine in exchange for a hamburger while I listen to their nephew play guitar.”

This is one of the challenges we hope to solve by rolling out phase two of Music Xray. You may have seen phase one which was the introduction of attractive and useful song presentation packages. Here’s an example of one. Artists / Song owners are getting them for their songs at $2 each because they help measure and monitor the traction a song is getting in the market and they can even help predict the traction a song can get if properly promoted. But another reason is that Music Xrays are being accepted as the preferred submission vehicle in the industry. Instead of filling their brief cases, tote bags and the floors of their car back seats with CDs and clogging their in-boxes with emailed MP3s, MIPs are asking those who want to submit music to them to simply email them the link to their songs’ Music Xrays.

But phase two of our business is actually a platform that enables MIPs to set up profiles and Music Xray drop boxes. MIPs can choose to charge a small fee to accept submissions. They can even set themselves up to review / critique music and provide advice and coaching to artists for a larger fee. The platform is in beta and has limited functionality compared to what it will have but the idea is to enable MIPs to painlessly accept, discover, manage and review music.

Imagine the next time you’re at a conference, a gig or run into your friend whose cousin’s girlfriend is in a band. Instead of taking the CD you can hand them your card with your Music Xray dropbox URL on it. You can tell them you get too much music to keep track of so you’ve set up a dropbox for each level of service request. One for just a listen. One for a listen and some feedback. One for people to submit songs to you for a specific project you’re working on such as a movie… maybe even a free submission dropbox for people for whom you want to do favors.

Take a look here. We’re still in beta so the sign up process is not quite yet self-provisioning but if you fill out this form we’ll contact you and get you all set up.

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