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

Brian, I totally didn't catch the sarcasm. My bad! We were both up pretty late.

Yeah, there are a number of sites that do basically the same thing for free. Pandora, Slacker, even the Genius feature in iTunes. But they probably don't play my music as much if at all, and don't share any stats with artists.

I registered with SoundExchange a few years back, but I just found out they had the wrong address. It turns out they owe me $41. If the statement breaks down the payment by source, I'll let you know! The Jango FAQ says they pay royalties, but they only mention ASCAP and BMI by name. I'm not expecting much, considering how little I'm earning from Last.fm.

My assumption is that plays count even if they are to the same listener. I personally would prefer the same person hearing my song over and over, because I'm told a lot of my songs are "growers."

For evidence, I've got my stats. I can visit the fans' profiles, but I can't otherwise verify the play totals, likes, and profile views. They don't tell you the times the song was played or the names of who it was played to. With approximately 400 plays per day, that would be a long list! The best evidence that the song is reaching real people are the hundreds of comments on my profile. If you read them, you'll see what I mean. They can't possibly be fake, because they uniquely describe my music.

My return on investment is impossible to measure, and Jango doesn't make any promises. If we only count things we can verify, as of today I've got 188 self-declared "fans," a couple hundred comments, a handful of e-mails (I got a nice fanmail this morning), demographic info on who likes my songs and what other bands they like, and $20 in sales - at a cost of $200. Sadly, that's more than I have to show for $7,000 spent on traditional radio promotion.

If Jango implements some of my suggestions, I'll have more concrete data. Even if they don't, my CD Baby digital sales figures might provide some clues in a month or so. If the airplay program really is a good investment for musicians, it's in Jango's best interest to develop tools to measure the results.

I feel like we've reached a point where we understand each other's perspective, even though we don't agree on everything. You're opposed to pay-to-play at a fundamental level, whereas I'm happy to give it a shot and see what happens. We both want to measure the results, but we don't have enough data. You say stay away because it's unproven. I say it's cheap and at least as effective as traditional radio promo, which I will never waste my time and money on again.