Investing in Talent
A lot of songs will get a 15% probability score, but about 650 to 700 songs every quarter actually get a 99% score, as high as our scale goes. When we see songs at 99%, we contact those artists and say, here’s our deal: If you don’t have $400 to spend or don’t believe in our prediction scores, we’ll put our money where our mouth is. Here’s $400 and when you land a deal on our dime we recoup our $400 off the top and then we get 20% of the revenue that deal generates. That’s our business model.
Charging = Filtering
Shopping a song on our platform has a cost. We charge submission fees, but that’s not our revenue. If you look at a platform like SoundCloud, there are 12 hours of audio uploaded every minute with no guarantee the industry is listening. On Music Xray, there is that guarantee. You can submit your song to any professional you want and as many as you want, but that submission fee puts the artists in the position of filtering themselves first. We’ve created a platform that lets [professionals] tap into a manageable stream of high-quality music that is highly targeted to what they’re looking for.
Data Points
For every song submitted to a professional, we ask them to rate the song, giving it a one to five star rating on different criteria—composition, production, arrangement, performance and hit potential. We’ve been observing every touch point between every professional and every song they’ve heard. We also have a fan component—every song gets sent to 20 potential fans.
This last June, we plugged that [data] into Amazon’s machine-learning platform and essentially told the machine to look at all the songs that got selected for opportunities, find out what they have in common, which professionals listened to them, which professionals’ ears seem to be more predictive of a song going on to get a deal than not and so on.
Helping Artists Target Opportunities
People know what they’re looking for and upload reference tracks. We have software that analyzes these tracks, so when an artist uploads music into our system every one of their songs gets analyzed. They get an email showing them all the professionals who have uploaded reference tracks similar to what the artist uploaded. Professionals on our site have videos talking about what they’re looking for. There are also success stories, where you can listen to music that has been selected by professionals in the past and you can make a judgment for yourself about whether you’re in that league.
Reality Checking
Over 83% of musicians who use Music Xray leave after their first or second submission, because they’re getting a reality check and realizing they’re not going to have a shot. That’s okay with us; that’s part of the point. We’re not trying to maximize revenue from artists paying submission fees. We’re trying to optimize it so it costs less to either get that pass/failure or actually get a deal.
Rhythm and Algorithms
Industry professionals come to the site, find the music they want and get out of there. They don’t want to rate a bunch of songs. We built complex algorithms that monitor the way professionals rate songs. Our system learns an A&R’s tastes and can tell if the guy’s getting lazy. Also, it learns if a professional’s tastes are consistent with another’s tastes. Then, it can observe that this one’s starting to go all over the map and it will flag him. Our data is the most important thing and, if you’re giving us crappy data, we don’t want you. If they get three alerts, it blocks their ability to rate further songs and their access to the collective data.
A Haystack of Needles
We have a giant filter called Needlestack. You can set filters to say “show me pop songs sung by females that have a beat per minute range of whatever, that have been heard by five other professionals in the past 24 hours and on average are getting four out of five stars on each criteria.” It pulls the cream to the top. About half the deals done on the site are from direct submissions the artists make, but the other half of the deals come from industry professionals finding what they’re looking for in Needlestack.
Hooking Deals
We have a feature called Hook Blast. When an artist uploads their song, and it’s a genre that typically has a hook, our system says, “Would you like to bracket the hook?” You can put markers on the timeline of the song and a professional can click the marker to play the hook. It has increased getting selected for deals by 15%. It’s a little feature, but it’s made a big difference.
Clients: Atlantic Records, Epic Records, Interscope, Def Jam, Roc Nation.
Years with Company: 10
Web: musicxray.com
