Thursday, January 26, 2006

Where to get feedback on your song

You are going to write a lot of songs in your lifetime. You'll love some of them, but won't know how they resonate with listeners. How can you find out the effectiveness of yours songs without spending a fortune on a focus group? I have several suggestions that I think will help you assess your material and your audience.

A number of websites allow you to submit songs for review and rating by listeners. It will cost you something--either money or effort--so it isn't exactly free. But the knowledge you gain about your songs and who likes them will give you great insight on how to market them. This is especially true if you intend to do the marketing yourself, and not through a third party such as a record label. For an added bonus, you also promote your music and your act when you have songs reviewed by these sites.

My favorite review site--designed with independent musicians in mind--is GarageBand.com. My first reaction was to stay away, because "Garage Band" to me is synonymous with "unprofessional." But if you check this site out, you actually find out there is quite a bit of professional sounding work out there.

So far, I like GarageBand.com best because it strives so hard to be impartial. Reviewers are randomly provided songs to review, without any information as to who performed the work. That way, your ratings won't be skewed by people who are already fans, or sabotaged by rival bands. A very robust characteristic of the site is the ability to pick a fairly narrow genre to be judged in. There is a real difference between "Folk" and "Folk Rock" when you think about it. This site allows you to make those kinds of distinctions. To submit your song you need to conduct 20 pairs of song reviews as a member, or pay about twenty bucks. For the information you get, the twenty dollars is a steal.

IdolUnderground.com allows you to submit songs for review by listeners, but I see it as a place to promote music, not receive serious knowledge about your music. The categories are not as focused, so a "Pop Rock" song will have to compete with other forms of rock. A "Folk Rock" song will have to go into either Folk or Rock--what an ugly choice.

I believe MySpace.com--a blogging site--allows musicians to upload songs for free. The resulting comments on the material will be pretty random.

Of course the dream is to rise to the top of any Internet "Indie" charts out there. Why? Because it raises the possibility that the music bloggers in cyberspace will notice. A lot of these folks are the tastemakers of our day. If they say it's good, then more people will check it out and hopefully buy it.

You can check my GarageBand page out at http://www.garageband.com/artist/RMGalloway.