JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Legitimizing Pay-for-Play

Great discussion!

Billy, thank you for describing your methods in detail! That really does sound like a formula for success, at least back when there was money to be made selling music. My pre-2000 formula wasn't too far from yours. I attribute most of my initial success to compilation CDs, back when there was a strong and supportive synthpop community. Unfortunately, that community has all but disappeared. I didn't have as much success at radio, but as you mentioned, I fall between the cracks of mainstream genres. I bet that formula could actually still work pretty well today in country, if the goal is building a fan mailing list rather than making money.

Brian, I wonder how much those arguments apply to Jango or Last.fm. By your definition, I'd argue that Jango is selling a service. They will play your song to x number of listeners of the bands you choose. That's it, and they don't pretend to offer anything beyond that. To call it a scam is completely unfair, in my opinion.

Instead of comparing Jango to terrestrial radio, let's compare it to Pandora. I know Pandora has helped me, because I've received at least a dozen e-mails from strangers telling me they heard my music there and asking how to buy my CDs. While they have different recommendation engines, Pandora and Jango are very much alike. They both play music based on user suggestions. If I had to pay a $100 fee for Pandora to analyze my music for the Music Genome Project, I'd do it. I'd understand if they had to charge a fee - it's a lot of work! But for now, it's free. For $100, Jango will play my song 5,000 times, arguably to people who want to hear it. I think it's reasonable to expect the same kind of listener response to my music that I get from Pandora. After all, the listeners don't know whether or not I paid for it. And Jango offers the extra benefit of allowing me to send out a daily bulletin to all my "fans" (144 so far - it's a start!), or message them individually.

As for internet radio being overrun by rich but talentless hacks, I don't see it happening. Both Jango and Last.fm allow you to ban the song. Jango can elect not to approve the song in the first place. In researching my blog post on the subject, I spent some time listening, and didn't hear any indie stuff that sounded worse than the major label stuff. If it's crap, the users will vote it down, and that will be the end of that.

I hope I'm not in the position where I need to defend payola historically, or even Jango specifically. I'm just saying that, looked at in isolation, Jango (and Last.fm, though it's more expensive) offer services that I believe will help expand my fan base. Even if I value my time at only $5/hour, it's cheap compared to most of the methods I've tried. Obviously it's not the only thing I'm doing, or I wouldn't have much to write about in my promotion blog.

Brian
http://www.colortheory.com
http://www.passivepromotion.com