What I’ve learned is that nothing replaces the expert human ear when it comes to A&R. However, technology has emerged that can enhance the music industry’s human skills in much the same way a medical doctor’s skills are enhanced by the X-ray machine and other modernities. The X-ray machine doesn’t do the job of the doctor. It just gives the doctor additional information upon which better decisions can be made. Today, no one would consider seeing a doctor who doesn’t use state of the art technology.

So whether it has been using computers to help predict hit songs or developing an A&R platform that harnesses state-of-the-art technology to help the industry perform better, solving the music filtering problem has been my passion for a long time.

I’ve been thinking about a clever way to describe Music Xray’s new Song to Opportunity (S₂O) Matching system and the best way I’ve come up with (so far) is that:

It turns your songs into opportunity magnets.

Or maybe it’s the match.com for songs and opportunities to find each other.

Maybe it’s the Pandora for A&R…

However we describe it, I think it’s pretty cool. You upload your songs for free and then sit back and wait to be alerted when an industry professional is seeking a song like yours. Give it a shot. The more songs you upload the more alerts you will get.

Here’s how it works:

1. Some of the hundreds of music industry professionals who use Music Xray to find songs and acts have given us a few “seed” songs. That is, songs that have a musical style and sound similar to what they would like to have submitted to them. For example, if they are seeking a new single for Britney Spears they might give us a few of her songs plus an additional song in the style and sound they are seeking.

2. Music Xray uses software to analyze the acoustic properties and underlying mathematical patterns of the “seed” songs and compares them to those in songs that have been uploaded for free into the company’s system by artists and rights holders.

3. Music Xray notifies the artists when there is a match between what professionals are seeking and the artists’ songs.

We’re not making any formal announcements nor really talking much about this while the service is in beta. Nevertheless, we’re thrilled that Music Xray is pushing the envelope. It’s the first enhanced A&R platform in the world. It harnesses cutting edge technology to enable the industry to filter through large quantities of music to find the most appropriate songs for each opportunity.

This is A&R on steroids.

Click here for more information.

Why the CD is dead and what music companies need to do about it. A great short “YouTube” video that every potential Independent Label/Production Company/Artist Development Company/Management Company should watch. Jim Park Young is a Korean music executive and provides wisdom keys concerning why he feels his company has been so successful in marketing pop artist overseas. During the interview, Mr. Young also states that the Album format is dead and that the key to success for the foreseeing future will be on creating great singles and selling them online. He also states that if your focus is only toward selling music from your project, you are leaving too much money on the table.

“I Quit” by Davis Rogan

Davis Rogan

I suppose they’re used to that.

In the music business, bands also pay for access to top industry people. Artists spend years of their lives and thousands of dollars touring, pushing their CDs and trying to generate enough buzz to get the attention of someone in the music business who will take them to the top.

We all pay for access whether we want to or not. The only choice we have is how we pay. For most people, the smartest choice is the path of lowest cost (in terms of time and money) that achieves the desired outcome, i.e. access.

At Music Xray, we give artists access at the click of the mouse and for a fraction of the cost it would take most artists to access many of the same people. We don’t guarantee you place a song or that you get signed. That will depend on your song and perhaps the relationship / dialog you can strike up with the industry professional receiving the song.

That’s just like any business. You can get access but it doesn’t guarantee you win the sale. That depends on what you bring to the table.

Point 1: The nature of unsolicited material

Many top labels, management firms and publishing companies do not accept unsolicited material at all. Someone reminded me just last week that only two tenths of one percent of unsolicited material is usable. Everyone in the industry knows this, so imagine how much you would have to listen to in order to find something you can use. It’s too much, especially when you have multiple projects to fill. And that fraction is only getting smaller with the increased number of artists creating music.

Point 2: The nature of the bottleneck

As I’ve covered before here recently, there are far more artists and songs than there are revenue generating opportunities for music. Each revenue generating opportunity that involves that a decision be made regarding which music or act to use has a person (or worse, a committee) making the decision. Let’s call them opportunity gatekeepers. No wait, let’s call them music industry professionals (MIPs).

MIPs are people with jobs, bosses, pressures of modern life and they have to produce results. They only have so many hours per day or week that they can devote to listening to new music. Most of them do not have to go out and hunt for music. It comes to them in a constant, unstoppable flow. If they wanted to, they could spend every waking hour listening to new music and still barely put a dent in the amount that they’re asked to listen to.

Point 3: Legal concerns and other hassles of unsolicited material

The nature of the business requires MIPs to view songs and sometime acts themselves as mere products. MIPs want to be efficient. If they express interest or disinterest in a song or an act they want to be able to dispatch with the business of it either way. They want smooth sailing on the business side if a deal is to go forward and they don’t want to be endlessly hounded by the artists and their managers if they don’t have interest, use or ability to move forward. From the MIP’s perspective it’s so much easier to deal with a professional they know and have dealt with in the past than it is to deal with hundreds or even thousands of emerging artists who more often than not do not know or understand the music business. Additionally, there have been times when an artist has sent in a song. Maybe it got listened to, maybe it didn’t but the artist never heard back. Then, the label released another band’s album and lo and behold, a song very similar to the one that was submitted ends up on the album and a lawsuit ensues. The companies that employ MIPs have opted to avoid this problem by simply not accepting and not listening to unsolicited material. It goes straight into the trash.

All in all, that’s a shame. And yes, it is true that there is a lot of awful music out there that is hard to filter through. But there are also increasing amounts of great songs which deserve to be heard and acts who deserve a shot. In fact, even music and acts that are not great deserve a shot and deserve professional feedback that will help them improve but I’ll cover that in another post.

My Conclusion: Solve a problem for MIPs and you solve a problem for musicians

At Music Xray we knew we couldn’t get the artists heard unless we first solved a problem for the MIPs.

So, first we built a really cool submission receiving platform that even without many bells and whistles it makes receiving, managing, evaluating and providing feedback on song submissions a lot easier than dealing with a stack of CDs (and keeping each artist’s contact information with the right CD) and having to manage an email inbox full of MP3s. Then we added some features that help them quickly see everything in one place – lyrics, videos, artist bios, songwriter notes, license information, artist traction stats from MySpace, Last.fm, Twitter, blogs, etc…

Doing that alone was enough to convince some industry professionals to accept song submissions for free – no catches, no strings attached. There’s a list of them here: http://www.musicxray.com/artist/categories/15

Other industry professionals said, “That’s great, but even so, we can’t just open it up to receive submissions willy nilly because we’ll still be overwhelmed.” In those cases, we (Music Xray) put up a small transaction fee which isn’t so much to make it cost prohibitive but it’s enough so that artists only submit their best material and it keeps things manageable.

Lastly, there are industry professionals who are happy to take song submissions via Music Xray but they prefer to charge what is usually a very reasonable submission fee. The fee covers some of the cost of screening or simply makes it worthwhile to spend time taking submissions via Music Xray vs another source. Sometimes it pays for some infrastructure like podcast distribution or music hosting. The reasons vary. Typically, the fee is much less than it would cost both in terms of time and money for an artist to reach these people who we make available at the click of a mouse. It’s fair because the professionals in question guarantee they listen, the user gets confirmation once the professional has listened and many of them guarantee feedback. That’s so much better than having a submission disappear into a black hole and never knowing if it was even heard.

So, do I think paying to submit is ideal? No. It shouldn’t work that way. Artists and industry professionals should go forth in the market together and win or lose together. But that’s not how it’s working out. If you don’t have the right relationships to get your music into the hands of the decision makers and are unwilling to pay to submit, you will be shut out by those who will.

What I hope is clear is that by having some of the problems related to accepting unsolicited material solved, MIPs can now offer you access to opportunities they could not in the past.

Next week I’ll tell you how to increase your chances of getting deals when you submit music.

OKGO is more known for their videos than their songs – even though I do think their music is pretty good. If you’ve never seen these guys you might want to watch the videos in reverse order, starting at the bottom of this post. This first one was choreographed by one of the band member’s sisters and was shot in one take. It did so well on the web that their next video was done in the same vein but using treadmills.

I remember sitting in Capital EMI offices in 2005 having a discussion with the band about computer-based hit predictions and they were not buying it at all. They had yet to release their first song through EMI so they were completely unknown. I guess they believed much more in viral video-based hit prediction and I definitely it worked for them even though we had predicted that the music alone wasn’t enough to get them on the charts. Anyway, these are great videos so even if you’ve seen them they’re worth watching again.

This new video is much more entailed but seems to be equally good. It’s for their new song “This Too Shall Pass”

This is their second video to their song called “Here It Goes Again”. By the way, the guy singing in the video is (as I understand) not their lead singer. He’s actually the drummer but he does play the role of the lead singer in their videos. Just another one of their quirks.

This is their first video to their song called “A Million Ways from 2005″

It’s important to note that much of the interview I did for this story was based on initial work I was involved with in this field from 2001 to 2005 at a company I co-founded called Uplaya. That didn’t come through in the published piece. Uplaya was granted a patent in this field in 2006 and that obliged us at Music Xray to change direction in our research and development. Currently, while Music Xray uses a mix of technology and human skills to predict the future success of music, we do not offer a straight, technology-driven hit prediction service.

1 Page from the BBC Focus Feature.