Quality "filters" coming back on the internet?

http://earbits.com/#staticId=artist_registration

That's a good thing, I hope it catches on...

Maybe. Who does the screening? Is Justin Beiber "radio ready?"

Gatekeeprs are a necessity, but who certifies them? How do they determine what is and is not 'radio ready'?

Hey Everybody,

I'm glad to see the support for a more selective independent radio platform.

To answer the questions here, yes, Justin Bieber would be considered radio ready, but don't judge us just yet. Radio ready to us is not about dictating style or taste, it's about quality. We're looking for a high quality, professional level recording that was not just recorded well but properly mixed (probably mastered) and provided to us in a high bit rate format. The level of musicianship must be up to par with what you expect from other radio formats.

Basically, when you go to many "anyone can be discovered" independent radio websites, you have to wade through a lot of poor quality music to hear a few good ones. The recordings are bad, the bands are amateur, and there doesn't seem to be any minimum level of standard. We want anyone who comes to Earbits to be surprised (and they usually are) by how much fantastic music we have that they have never heard, and how great an indie experience can be when care is taken. Certainly there will be songs that they don't enjoy, and if Justin Bieber were approved I am guessing you guys would not enjoy him, but there should not be anyone on our platform that makes people think we're letting "just anyone" on our stations.

To ensure that we know what we're talking about, as we grow, we bring in more specialized experts to help us manage each channel. Managing our Hip Hop and R&B channels is Roshmond "Sum" Patten who is an incredible Hip Hop artist and was Associate Editor at RIME magazine before launching his own Hip Hop community site. We've just hired Scott Feldman to help curate and manage our Rock catalogs. Scott is also a seasoned musician and Assistant Music Supervisor for the hit show Sons of Anarchy. Managing it all is our co-founder and EVP of Music, Yotam Rosenbaum, an ASCAP award winning jazz composer and magna cum laude graduate from Berklee College of Music.

I hope that helps shine some light on our process. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. My information is available on our blog.

Thanks everybody.

Joey Flores

CEO, www.earbits.com

are you hiring?

Joey:

The primary factor in my listening interests is artistic content. The mechanical quality of the recording is of tertiary importance, I'd much rather listen to Led Zeppelin than Brokencyde. The performance quality is secondary, BB King is far better to listen to than Dragonforce for most. If there is not a primary, overarching goal of delivering a high standard of artistic quality, then I might as well watch American Idol.

Well, I agree, to a point, but I have BB King re-issued records that are unlistenable, IMO. The same with early Fleetwood Mac, and dozens of old recordings. I don't see why we shouldn't expect better quality these days, and while the recording isn't necessarily my main concern, there are a lot of records I won't listen to no matter how good the songs are just because they sound like ass.

Who ever coughs up the most cash, seems to be the standard procedure.

I'm all for this. Yes there's always the problem that we're at the mercy of the website's defnition of what constitutes "quality", but hey, that's the way the old model of the music biz worked.

One thing that does seem to be gone is the idea that something grows on you with repeated listenings. I can remember working in a record store and Michael Frank's "The Camera Never Lies" came out. The first time I heard it, I didn't like it at all. By the tenth time I heard it, I was a big fan. Sometimes music takes repeated exposure to grow on you, but since practically no one listens to the radio any more, I think this element is gone. And because it's gone, we are probably missing out on some stuff that we'd really like. Part of the instant gratification transformation of America. You got 6 seconds to impress me... GO! In the future pop songs will be 30 seconds long.

Hey Daddymack - We just made two hires recently and are holding off on anymore until we raise additional funding. At that time, I would imagine will be adding a Jobs page to our site that you can keep an eye on.

-Joey

I here exactly what you're saying, Emrghoti. The music I like isn't just "good", it's awesome. It has less to do with recording quality and more to do with musical innovation and originality. As an example, based on recording quality alone, albums like Opiate by Tool or 40 Ounces to Freedom by Sublime might struggle to be approved. We aim not to let that happen. The point is that there needs to be a standard, and we have to take into consideration that some people will like music that is not fulfilling to other people on an artistic level. But what most people will agree on is that there needs to be a minimum level of professionalism to the product, which is a combination of a few things that we try to consider before approving anybody. There are plenty of people who will like Dragonforce better than BB King. The point is that both are professional products. Luckily, we don't have to choose. Those two bands would never be in the same channel and we intend to give listeners as close to what they want as we can determine from their behavior. Will we make mistakes? Of course. But we'll try the best we can and listen to feedback as we go.

-Joey

This may be a useful avenue for me later down the road. Will you have a channel or section for Death Metal bands? If so, i'd be interested in trying it when I have my stuff recorded professionally and it is new & fresh, I know everyone says that, so i'll just email you a copy when I am done. That's if I can send a couple songs at a time, or do I have to have the whole album done first?

Thanks, look forward to your reply.

Who ever coughs up the most cash, seems to be the standard procedure.

I can understand that surface level perception but there is a lot that goes into how we curate our channels, who is approved for what, and who gets played for who. The performance of a song in a channel and its suitability for a listener weigh far more heavily than any other factors. The fact that we charge at all is intended to align our business incentives with the needs of the bands. Ad sponsored companies may seem "fair", but they have no incentive whatsoever to give a new artist a break. We are driven to work with as many artists as we can, and yet we know we have to be selective for listeners to find our service as enjoyable as other services. Further, we actually put restrictions on ourselves that force us to do what's right for both artists and listeners. I think if we had an extended dialog about it, you'll see that we've thought this through very well and are trying to do something very meaningful.

-Joey

So you have no ads at all? and if you do have ads, can a band buy space or is that not allowed? and if it's not allowed......how much to allow it?

Yeah, having a gatekeeper always brings up questions of fairness and credibility, but at the end of the day it's the lack of a gatekeeper that make Myspace Music and other services a noisy mess that is not that fun for music discovery. Part of the reason we are more focused on quality of product as opposed to style or taste, is because we're not trying to block artists who might be enjoyed by people, even a small group. We're just trying to make sure that listeners feel they're getting a high quality experience.

-Joey

Ok, I checked out your site, I didn't notice poker99 had a link so you do have a metal channel.

But how do you determine how many times a band gets played?

Oh and I like this kinda setup, reminds me of zune for xbox360. They only allow polished recordings/bands on there too.

So you have no ads at all? and if you do have ads, can a band buy space or is that not allowed? and if it's not allowed......how much to allow it?

We do not have ads and we hope to never have them. Our model is to make radio itself an advertisement for new music and to open it up to strong bands and labels as an outlet for being heard. Bands are our clients and we only accept clients who we feel are good and who will gain value from the exposure. We plan to make the service as cheap as possible and let the market tell us what our service is worth over time. As opposed to other services, we will focus our efforts on helping our clients monetize the exposure through the sale of music, merchandise and live event tickets.

Bands spend $.10 on fliers that go into the trash or $.25 for a click on Facebook, and all they're hoping for is that someone makes it to a place where they can hear the music and then decide to buy a ticket or some other product. There are 2-4 steps before a person will usually hear a song and make this determination, and $.25 is a huge price to pay for someone who doesn't actually know what they're going to find on the other side of that ad.

If we let a band with incredible modern jazz buy exposure in a highly targeted modern jazz channel for $0.01, it's a far better value than an ad or flier, and it allows us to focus on making bands and listeners happy instead of trying to sell ads to Toyota.

People have a knee-jerk reaction when you talk about selling airplay. Why? These same people don't protest Kinko's or Facebook Ads - and those are a complete ripoff for new bands. Spending $10 and being played for 1000 people is huge value, and we hope that people can get past their initial perception of the model and realize that it's probably the most effective form of guaranteed advertising for a new band out there. Talk to anyone on our team and you'll quickly realize that we're all musicians with our sights on changing marketing for emerging artists.

As for your metal band, you should check out the metal channel we have now. It's not strictly death metal, but man there is some hardcore stuff in there. We have Arch Enemy, Parkway Drive, Bring Me the Horizon and a bunch more. I love metalcore and our channel rips my face off. It's awesome.

-Joey

I am listening to your metal channel right now, listening to Dying Fetus, one of my fav bands all-time

I will pay some money once I record some solid tracks and take my "glamour" photo's heh.

But how do we know we're getting heard? I know there was some discrepency of a similar site that didn't actually always give you the amount of plays promise or would play you during a time when no one was up listening. It was different than your site as it was more of a standard broadcast radio type of deal, but still, a lot of people felt a bit cheated.

Not calling you a cheat, just curious to how you work. I would give you $100 at first just to test the waters and see if we can benefit each other. The bigger I get off your site, the more money you make, etc.

I am listening to your metal channel right now, listening to Dying Fetus, one of my fav bands all-time I will pay some money once I record some solid tracks and take my "glamour" photo's heh. But how do we know we're getting heard? I know there was some discrepency of a similar site that didn't actually always give you the amount of plays promise or would play you during a time when no one was up listening. It was different than your site as it was more of a standard broadcast radio type of deal, but still, a lot of people felt a bit cheated. Not calling you a cheat, just curious to how you work. I would give you $100 at first just to test the waters and see if we can benefit each other. The bigger I get off your site, the more money you make, etc.

Haha! I just posted Dying Fetus to my Facebook page the other day to get a rise out of my friends. They are seriously aggressive; I love it.

There does have to be a trust factor involved but you will actually get reports of how many times your song was played, how many times it was skipped, how many clicks we drove to your Facebook or Myspace page, and more. When I said we implement restrictions that help force us to do a good job, an example is that if a listener skips your song in the first 20 seconds, we don't charge you. We consider that a bad match, and matching is OUR job, not yours.

The most important way that you'll know you're getting played, though, is that we will create ways for you to actually generate sales from the airtime. Those might be live event ticket sales, or any number of products that you're already marketing through other services. And, we don't take a cut of your sales.

I would explain a bit more about that but we do want to keep some of our strategies to ourselves until we're closer to actually offering them.

-Joey

No problem, gotta keep some stuff secret always. Well it sounds good & fair to me, so it'll be a few months before I can do it, but i'll definitely give you guys a try.

Thanks for your time.

Fair enough. It's a little disconcerting that it's a pay-to-play model, but good luck to you, or at least to somebody. I've argued that the lack of an official stamp of marketability, such that a major label contract used to be, is the fatal flaw in internet "radio."

I totally hear you. It's like I said...people inherently "feel" like pay to play is bad, mostly because much of it is. If a club wants you to pre-sale $400 worth of tickets for a show when they have no draw and make no attempt to book you with similar acts, I say tell them to go {censored} themselves. But if they want you to pre-sale $400 worth of tickets for a chance to open for a national act that is surely going to bring in 500 people, and they put your name on all of the promotions they send out, then it may actually be a good opportunity.

The question is, is the person able to deliver real value, and better value than the other services bands consider normal these days? Bands spend $500 a month for three months to try out a new publicist whose only job is to get them college airtime. Maybe, just maybe, the band gets played by a station or two, if they're lucky. For that same $1500 at one cent per play, where you only pay if the person listens longer than 20 seconds, we're talking about playing you 150,000 times, guaranteed. I know that it's not what the indie industry is used to, but I think if we do it right, it could really bridge the gap between having a great product and cost effectively marketing it to the right audience. Fliers, posters, publicists and Facebook ads are just not cutting it for bands. We think this could really change things and we hope everyone will reserve judgment as we try to prove out our vision for Earbits.

Thanks to everyone for the opportunity to chat about it.

-Joey

Wait, you pay the bands to play their music or they pay you?

Right now, we are licensed with ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, paying the appropriate publishing and licensing royalties. We will continue to do that. In the future, artists will be able to purchase airtime through our platform and use it to promote specific shows, products or releases. They can target their audience by region and other demographics, and can sell tickets and other merchandise direct from the homepage during their broadcast. It will be significantly more effective and affordable than fliers, radio promotion services, or Facebook ads.

-Joey