Slicethepie Launches Anonymous Song Test
UPDATE: SoundOut is now live.
Fan to band financing site Slicethepie is launching a new service aimed at labels and artists that want to a test a song prior to release. Dubbed SoundOut, for $20 to $50 users can upload a song and have it rated anonymously by Slicethepie users.
"The way it works now is that the A&R department establish between themselves which artists they're interested in," Slicethepie founder David Courtier-Dutton told Epicenter. "Once they've spent a couple hundred thousand pounds [recording the album] … they run them out to
market research companies and pay a thousand dollars a track to get some focus-group feedback."
24 hours after uploading the song the uploader gets a report that rates how various target markets reacted to the song. Courtier-Dutton claimed that tests showed that if run the same song through SoundOut more than once, it generates the same ratings within 5% accuracy. via Wired you can view a pdf of a sample SoundOut song response report here.
HYPEBOT READERS: Is SoundOut a service you would use?
This idea is fantastic. I love it. It takes a time of uncertainty and gives artists/labels a lot of power to know where to put their marketing money/energy.
$20 to $50?
Someone can easily code up a free version of this ala hotornot.com