So this poster is now in my front window… hopefully this will fix two problems.

You can watch the rest on “The Tube”…

This was my first time singing tenor with Tom and we had some fun on this one…

I book bands for a popular music festival in a major dairy producing state and every year, SonicBids contacts me looking for us to use their service to accept band submissions. The first year they contacted us, though I had read the bad reviews, I decided to have a look for myself so I signed up my band to test it out. The spam started immediately and was unrelenting. Now this should be all you really need to know as no legit business would spam folks and is an excellent indication of the kind of company you’re dealing with. Still, I spent a bit of time checking out SonicBids.

I was really being too nice to them… but it’s not all their fault, they’re only enabling the scam; promoters are allowing the scam. Let me cut to the chase: legit promoters don’t charge bands to submit themselves for a gig. Period.

But on top of that, the site just sucks. I mean, as a promoter, I couldn’t easily search through the bands on their site and find ones I’d be interested in hiring. Searching for genre was worthless, no good way to search by location, keywords didn’t return reasonable results, etc…. So I couldn’t and wouldn’t use their site to find an artist. Which makes it necessary to let the bands find me… which just happens to support their paradigm.

The icing on the cake was when the SonicBids recruiter called again (and they will hound you forever; they still call every year) and explained that “the submission process can be a revenue stream”. I told him we wouldn’t be using their service and cited the reasons above.

Long story only slightly longer: technology has made it easier than ever for musicians to market themselves (for free even) and promoters to find the bands that will make their events a success. If SonicBids actually cared about helping bands and promoters connect, they could use technology towards that goal but instead they used it to reinvent payola.

Case in point: Music Xray. Music Xray will tell you they are providing a service to these musicians by offering “exposure opportunities”, that put their music in front of “Music Industry Professional”… for a fee. Right, so if you’re a musician, instead of buying that QuickStop burrito, you can pay $3+ to submit your music to one of these “exposure opportunities” and have your music reviewed by an “industry professional”. Of course, anyone can sign up to be one of these said “professionals”. Yup, anyone and their uncle can sign up as one and start creating “opportunities” that charge musicians a submission fee. Or you could just cut out the middle man and give your uncle Lenny $3 to tell you how great you are (thanks Lenny!).

Think American Idol, except all the thousands and thousands of contestants have to pay to have to pay each judge for every “opportunity” to perform for them and instead of Simon, you get berated by uncle Lenny (who was in a band once). And in this scenario, Music Xray would be the TV producers who get to make coin off the whole thing, while declaring their innocence of any wrong-doing. It’s not their fault Lenny is really a refrigerator repair man and can’t cary a tune in a bucket.

Want more proof? Music Xray are also prolific spammers. Once you’re on their list, they will email you constantly with “opportunities” from a range of email domains, so you can’t kill them off with a spam filter. You can keep trying to “unsubscribe” but it won’t do you any good. Classy! How much money would you give to a spammer?

And Music Xray also searches for, and responds to, articles that discus their business as being a scam (like this one). This in itself is an obvious mark of a shady business.

So, is Music Xray a scam? Maybe it depends on how much you like QuickStop burritos. Judge for yourself…