New Music Model Experiment: GarageBand

Cayocosta

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on new music models. Part 1 is here.

I placed a couple of tracks on 3 different sites to get a handle on how these services work and how well they might help artists promote themselves and/or sell their music.

The Music:

The tracks used for the test were produced, engineered, recorded and written by professionals. Now, I'm not saying that the tracks are anything special; however, they are most certainly competitive with the bulk of offerings I have found available from these services.Self-

Self-Promotion:

There is literally zero artist self-promotion. The tracks are to live or die based solely on the service itself. There are no artist websites, and the acts and songs are - for all practical purposes - unknown.

GarageBand:

(Free storage, free streaming and downloads. CD sales)

After signing up and uploading a couple of tunes, I was prompted to enter each in the "contest" in order for my songs to be ranked in the charts and be reviewed (otherwise I assume they would be essentially invisible to visitors). At a cost of $20 bucks, I entered one song.

That was over 2 weeks ago. Since then, nothing has happened; no reviews, no rank, and the track is still at the bottom of the charts.

GarageBand maintains that should I chose to review other's songs - 15 pairs of them actually - I could forgo the $20 charge; moreover should I write a text review I would see my track go to the top of the pecking order for its review. However, after reading another member's account of the hour-long process (to review all the songs comprehensively) I decided to let it ride with just the contest entry for $20.

While searching for stats on how many listens my songs have received so far, I learned that to gain access to those stats, I would have to pay $99. Although this "gold" program includes a few other ups and extras, I decided to do without.

Interestingly, reviewers themselves are reviewed and scored, and from what I gather people get pretty angry with each other here; for essentially what appears to be happening is that a bunch of musicians are reviewing each other's material. Good grief.

With regard to artists selling music, GarageBand integrates CD Baby facilitating the sale of CDs.

Summary:

GarageBand appears to be a place where you will get absolutely nowhere without either paying or providing free labor in the form of reviewing tunes yourself. As for visibility, I'm still waiting for my first song to be reviewed (in the 1st round of 5 rounds, all with multiple reviews) so it could be quite a while that I turn into a skeleton before I can answer that question. Moreover, whether or not the community consists of anyone other than musicians is unknown, and as such the value of visibility in such an environment is questionable.

Overall, as with any other new-music model I've seen, without the ability of artists to successfully self-promote (which largely negates the need for such services anyway) the chances of getting anywhere on the service alone appear very slim.

As an industry friend remarked, "it looks like GarageBand is the only one making any money here."

Next up: Amie St