Has this ever happened to you? You think you’ve written your best song yet, but an offhand remark from a friend plunges you into self-doubt. Wouldn’t it help to have feedback from music fans of your genre who have no incentive to sugar-coat their opinions?
Sure, you say! I’ll just use SoundOut, or ReverbNation Crowd Review (also powered by SoundOut). Unfortunately, my experience with SoundOut, and those of most of the commenters, left a lot to be desired. I’ve also received a mostly useless – but free – focus group from Music Xray, and even repurposed Jango aka Radio Airplay to create my own focus group.
AudioKite has built a better mousetrap. Here’s why:
Amazon Mechanical Turk. Listeners are enlisted from Amazon Mechanical Turk rather than SliceThePie, the listener end of SoundOut. I don’t know the nuts and bolts of the operation, but the end result is that listeners comment coherently and seem to actually listen to the whole song. There’s no sign that anyone is trying to game the system by listening to only the first minute and copy/pasting generic reviews.
I asked Alex of AudioKite to explain how they ensure listeners are actually listening. Here’s what he had to say:
Due to the fact that a fair wage for mTurk workers is based on the amount of time they take to complete a task, and the fact that songs have varying lengths, listen time is a data point that changes from song to song. But despite our minimum listen time requirement of 40 seconds, nearly all respondents listen more than that – exactly 1 minute 44 seconds on average as of this writing. The average listening time for your …read more
Source: Music Think Tank
