Do you check out the promoters on your site?
Yes. Any promoter that wants to open a gig listing that charges for submissions is screened by our Business Development team. The screening process varies depending on the type of gig, but here are some examples of what they look for:
- If it's a festival or conference, for first time promoters we request a copy of the contract the promoter has with the venue to ensure that the event a) exists, and b) is on the specific day indicated.
- If it is a TV/Film licensing agreement we ensure that the parties involved are indeed tied into the film. We do this by asking for their contracts with the producer.
In all cases, Sonicbids will only do business with the decision-makers at the companies looking to list the gig. However, our screening process is by no means perfect. We work with our members to find out if something doesn’t seem right and if a listing turns out to be fraudulent in some way we will shut it down and refund anyone that submitted.
Based on my 3 years of experience in Artist Relations at Sonicbids, I can say that cases of outright fraud are actually very rare. Most bad experiences artists have with gig listings are the result of misaligned expectations or unexpected problems. Some real examples of unexpected problems I’ve seen are promoters who had sponsors drop out, unexpectedly got sick or injured, had loved ones pass away, and even a couple hurricanes.
Does Sonicbids insist that festivals that use their service only let people apply through Sonicbids?
No, most of the time promoters will still accept physical press kits the first time they use Sonicbids. Most of the gigs that are exclusive do so because the promoter finds it much easier to accept all of their submissions electronically in one central location via Sonicbids than to continue to deal with physical press kits and email submissions coming at them from all directions.
What happened when people got rejected from CMJ without their tracks being listened to?
There was a bug in our EPK Hits Tracker that caused streamed song plays to be tracked, but downloads to go uncounted. CMJ downloaded songs from all of their submissions for review, but because of the bug, the download did not get reported in the EPK Hits Tracker. Since this happened, we started tracking song downloads to prevent confusion in the future. We caught and fixed the bug back in September, and should have communicated what was happening and how we fixed it a lot better than we did.
We've got some exciting updates in the pipeline right now and to improve our communication on them we asked John, our Chief Technology Officer, to write a blog on the work his team is doing behind the scenes. It’s called the Builder’s Blog and is part of our new Sonicbids Lounge. If some of your readers would like to see how we’re working to build more transparency into the submissions process, this is the place for them to come and track the progress we’re making from week-to-week. Here’s the address: http://lounge.sonicbids.com/category/authors/builders-blog/ ( or click here).
Thanks again for the chance to answer these questions. I’m going to recommend we add any of these questions that aren’t already covered to our FAQ pages. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to drop me a line. Or if your readers have follow-up questions, they can reach me and the rest of the Artist Relations team via the contact form (at Sonicbids Support). Talking to our artists is why I’m here, and my favorite part of the job.
