Our goal is to discover artists, grow their audience, and help them generate real revenue online.
We've already found quite a bit of incredibly talented artists. Check out this recent submission from an artist in San Francisco: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7jcfFrpvMA
I would not do the usual bulleted FAQ, by the way. You are dealing with artists, and for them the presentation is as important as the content. Also, you should research what makes artists anxious. Address that in your copy. For example:
(Picture a website with an image of a backstage with some pretty sketchy looking folks in there).
We know you don't want to be taken for a ride. That is why we work with select insdustry people. You will be introduced to them. If you feel uncomfortable, will have the choice to decide against working with them. Our aim is to create a good team that will propel you towards the top of the charts and not nickel and dime you over every aspect of your career.
Thanks for the feedback - we're looking into how we can make more of a "killer offer". We've received quite a bit of feedback that videos would be very desirable.
I'm all for charging - it's the best way to eliminate the tire kickers. You obviously have to provide good value for money, and it sounds like you're getting some great feedback already, so keep up your data-driven feedback loop and I'm confident you'll end up with something really interesting and innovative.
For a lot of real artists $20 is a BIG deal, thats dinner for the band or gas to the next gig, any real artist would never agree to this, by charging $20 your only going to get desperate bands that everyone else ignores because they suck. It takes a minute to listen to someones mp3, your kidding yourself thinking charging is going to give you better overall quality.
I think there's definitely a market for helping artists get discovered, especially as more and more of them tend to operate online from their bedrooms instead of going on tour. So kudos for trying to help them along on that front.
From the other comments here, it looks like the $20 goes to the "feedback", and not the promotion to labels.
From an artist's point of view, this seems backwards. Personally I can't see why I would pay $20 just for feedback on a recording. If it's a demo recording, then there will be lots of things about it that could be improved, but I will already know this. If it's a professional recording from an album I've done, then it's sort of too late for feedback on it to do much for me. I suppose I could take it into consideration going forward, but my ability to act on this information still seems pretty minimal. So it's not clear why the "feedback" would be worth my $20, especially since there are lots of free ways out there to get feedback on your music.
"Submit your music for free, and if we like it we'll contact you about paying to have it promoted (and maybe give you some feedback)" is a model that would make more sense from my POV as an artist. That said, I know it's not the easiest model from your POV, as you'd be inundated with YouTube acoustic guitar covers.
So my advice would be to work on making it clear why the $20 will be well spent. I'd be more likely to pay up if I knew how likely I was to be "liked" by you, how likely I would be to get in touch with record companies if this were to happen, and exactly what benefit I could get from your feedback if I wasn't selected. This might something that gets easier once reputational effects start to play in.
- If your music isn't good enough to go viral yet then we can provide you with feedback on how to improve and reach that point.
- If your music IS good enough to go viral the we want to promote you, get you press, get you featured on YouTube, Ustream, etc (these are all things we can do very easily if your music is good - we already have these relationships).
- If you are really taking off we can help you monetize this growth in very interesting and artist/fan friendly ways. When you reach this stage we will enter into a production style agreement and take a % of the revenue we generate you. This is where we make our money and NOT on the original $20.
Concerns:
- If we don't charge we will be bombarded, like you pointed out, with low quality content. This is a problem we want to avoid.
- If we don't charge then we will be paying artists to review your content out of our own pocket.
Question: What would this site have to say so that when you saw it, as a musician, your reaction was "Holy shit I have to do this and would be stupid not to"?
If I was an artist considering this, I would want to see a video of the reviewing artist as they listened to my song. I would want to see their facial expression, and see that the reviewer seems like they know what they are talking about. Also, if I could listen to the music of the reviewing artist, I could judge if the review has any merit.
recieve => in this sentence "You will recieve promotion, expert social media strategy," is misspelled. other than that, I think it looks awesome.
well, except if I go to hipset.com or www.hipset.com -> neither of which work for me (Chrome Version 23.0.1271.101 on Macbook Pro OSX 10.7.5). I get a whirly box that doesn't do anything.
Without some details like a list w/ credentials of the reviewers, it comes off as less than credible. I'd wanna know who was reviewing me and what makes them qualified. Even if they're not the biggest of names, I'd be less leery if seeing more than 'verified artists'.
Calling Rap Genius "the #1 hip hop site" adds to this leeriness. Aside from the fact that it's not (no disrespect to Rap Genius), specifying a hip hop site as the success story on a page with limited details kind of pigeonholes it into seeming like a "rap thing" - potential artists that aren't making hip hop music may think they aren't qualified, or may become disinterested.
No prob. Like some others here I'm a musician myself so I've seen offers like these several times.
A 'seasoned' starving artist is going to be looking for rep & credibility. Doesn't have to be major artists, major labels, etc. Just show me that the music is gonna be reviewed by someone who might know what they're talking about and I'm interested.
How does a song get qualified as good? If the production is bad but the song itself is good, will it get attention? Is there a specific style of music for which your artist reviewers have expertise/preference?
If the production, vocals, and presentation (good branding, etc) are at a level where most people who like that genre would play the song and think "Yeah, this sounds like a real song..." then we will work hard to make sure those people hear the song.
Our artists are good at reviewing rap, pop, edm, country, rock, etc. All genres.
Currently we can help the most with promoting rap, hip-hop, pop, and edm. We can help all genres find labels (we know a lot of them).
That + Helping artist's content go viral as well (most artists don't understand viral Facebook integrations - so with Hipset we're automatically doing it for all of them)
We've already found quite a bit of incredibly talented artists. Check out this recent submission from an artist in San Francisco: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7jcfFrpvMA