Hi Lou….

Submission Review Tracking, that feature sounds great. We would like to have more information on reviewed status…BUT.. I think from the performers end …the big concern is real simple…we want our money back when promoters do not respond by the date promised in their pitch! I don’t know if you noticed, but their are plenty of promoters their promising a lot of things through your infrastructure…but are not held responsible for never replying to a submission. Why should we…the artist…pay for a promoter that simply does not have their shit together.. I think that is perfectly fair.

I (and our band is not the only one here, I have spoke to dozens of bands here in chicago and surrounding areas that use sonic bids…) we are more concerned with promoters meeting their response times…time and again a promoter says “we be be back with in buy this date” and that date comes and goes, and so does your hard earned band money.

The is no accountability in your system. I believe it would be easy for the promoter enter a reply by date when filling in their fields of the event…and when that date (reply date that was entered in the form) is not met… then the promoter automatically are billed for fees taken from the bands that were never replied to. In return, Sonic bids makes their money, the artists are reimbursed for slacker promoters, and most importantly the promoters are held responsible for giving a status as promised.

All we (the performers)are left with is this general website of the promoter…and are expected to track down and hold the promoters responsible for taking money from the artist and never actually returning a status. What happens to our money? I have had this conversation with a dozen band that use sonicbids…and every single one..( I am not exaggerating here) said the exact same thing. If a promoter is promising this and that and taking your 2, 5, 10, 15 25, 35 55 dollar fees… and then never get back to the submitting artist /group…

WHY is it the artist responsibility to track down our submission or be compensated for a deadline being neglected.
There needs to be an automated crediting system to keep these flaky promoters from promising the moon and simply taking our fees…

why can’t credit be issued back to accounts if a promoter does not actually meet their deadline as stated by their original pitch. How hard is that. I seriously am considering dropping sonic bids ( though we have done well with this system ).

Hey Joe,

Thanks so much for the detailed feedback. The status manager improvements are also going to include some checks and balances to hold promoters accountable to their notification dates.

We’re not ready to announce the full details yet, but I can say that there will be consequences for promoters that don’t update their submission statuses on time.

Stay tuned to the Builder’s Blog for more info over the next few weeks.

Rock on,

Lou

I’m not looking for gigs right now. The members of my band DanMingo are all too busy with other projects (like Massive Attack, Dirth and Space Ritual and I’m working with artists as varied as C.Kay and Eon).

I’m looking for recognition for my music, that of my band DanMingo, and myself. Both albums are available on http://www.isound.com, where there’s no geeky shit involved on isound – the interface is really easy to use. I mainly want my/our music to get licenced in video games and movies, to get a new publishing deal and hopefully a record deal or two. THEN we might think about gigs. Remember, we’re OLD, despite our fabulous collective track-records and our current status on the ‘youth-orientated’ NME wesite (number 18 most-voted for on http://www.nme.com)and having received nearly 100,000 plays on http://www.isound.com/danmingo. All this EPK this-and-that is time-consuming, confusing and utterly banal. And, if we’re paying a subscription, why on earth do we have to pay for individual submissions to whatever – the submissions should automatically be submitted based on data. You’re simply asking your subscribers to do all the work! How do I cancel my subscription? Buried in some geeky sub-page-within-a-sub-link no doubt.

It would that your site is simply aimed at young amateurs with more money than sense.

The record industry was hardly prescient about the current shareware/piracy situations, despite all the warnings spelt out by eminent internet journos for many years in the recent past. Spyder wrote the internet column from 1995 -99 for Time Out Magazine in London and warned way back then about this broadband meltdown. The record industry – or at least a large percentage of it – continued to bask in its smug, arrogant, self-indulgent, coke-fueled denial and is now suffering for its lack of foresight and ability to listen.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention. I was Spyder.

Cheers

Steve Swindells

Hey Steve,

I know Tony (our Member Relations Coordinator) already reached out to you directly when your comment came in, but I wanted to chime in on a couple of points you brought up.

You mentioned that you were looking for a record deal, and music licensing rather than live gigs. Our Promoter Drop Box actually has a section called “A & R/Publicity/Licensing” that specifically calls out those listings. You can see it here. One of our Lounge guest authors Peter Spellman also posted a great article on breaking into Film & TV Music Markets which you can check out here.

As for the submission and subscription fees, you can get more information about why they exist and what they cover here: http://www.sonicbids.com/support. In short, the subscription fee gives you an EPK and access to the network of opportunities. The submission fees are to send your EPK to specific listings in the Promoter Drop Box (we used to have a number of free drop boxes on Sonicbids and you can read about what happened to them here). Your suggestion to have submissions made automatically based on account data is something we’ve discussed before, but have (at least for now) decided against. We want Sonicbids to be an open marketplace for promoters and artists. We don’t tell promoters who they can and can’t book and don’t tell artists what they can or can’t submit to. If an artist wants to get their music in front of a specific promoter, we don’t want to get in the way. For the time being, we feel that the artist (rather than an algorithm) is in the best position to decide where their music is being sent.

Lastly, you’re absolutely right that the record industry was caught off guard by what was happening online in the late 90s. In the end though I think the industry shakeup will benefit the middle class artists at the expense of the superstars.

Lou