SliceThePie’s SoundOut Gets $2 Million Funding For Song Analytics
UK based SoundOut, an division of fan funding platform SliceThePie, has raised $2 million in equity funding from a number of private investors and entrepreneurs. Tens of thousands of online "scouts" have used the platform to generate 6 million reviews rating 75,000 tracks. SoundOut claims this comparative database can predict the commercial potential of a new release in any genre in any market.
It's a bold claim, but media, labels and artists eager to focus limited resources appear to be buying in. SoundOut’s new reasearch service for radio tracks every new release in the US and UK markets with online music scouts identifying tracks with hit potential.
Independent artists are primarily using SoundOut via partnerships with Sonicbids, IODA, InGrooves, CDBaby, SoundCloud and others.
"The funding announced today will enable us to further accelerate this adoption over the coming months and significantly advance our SoundOut technologies,” according to SoundOut CEO David Courtier-Dutton.
It appears the best way to make money in the music industry these days is to take money of naive musicians 🙁 Why couldn’t they have invested all that money in developing some bands ect? We don’t need a service for telling us how good a song is there is already a system in place for that called song sales.
Well…song sales don’t necessarily tell us how good a song is anymore. I look at the charts in the US right now and most of it is garbage. I am cognizant of the element of subjectivity when it comes to music but when songs do not have a melody, harmony, or lyrics, it is safe to say it is absolute garbage. Tools such as these might be able to predict radio-worthiness based on melodic and harmonic structures of a song but they definitely cannot predict “hits”. Whether or not a song is a hit is dependent on the gatekeepers (i.e. terrestrial radio at least in the US). Given their growing incompetence in the last 15 years, it is safe to assume that what does become a hit or what doesn’t is not really based on any intrinsic musical merit of a song.
I’d really like to know what more people have to say about this site. I think the info could be really helpful. Of course, part of me feels like it’s a scam. I’m going to look into it more when I get home tonight.
The ability for a service to predict success of a track must rely on the assumption that all successful music has to conform to the success factors which have come before. Seems like yet another force to slow the rate of change and originality in new music.