wax&wires

SliceThePie – Help Yourself To A Piece Of The Music Industry

I came across this site when poking around the net, and it looks like a pretty cool concept, though I’m not sure how well it will work in practice.

[From SliceThePie.com]

Slicethepie is a financing platform for the music industry that enables new and established Artists to raise money directly from Music Fans and Investors.

On Slicethepie, Music Fans take on the A&R role, earning money reviewing tracks, spotting new talent and ensuring the best Artists get put forward for financing.

Music Fans can then directly invest in the Artists in return for exclusive Artist access, a copy of the completed album, their name on the album sleeve and a decent share in the financial returns from album and single sales.

Investors (non-US only) can trade in and out of their Artist Investments at any time on the world’s first Music Trading Exchange, also hosted on the site.

You make about 5p per review, so don’t quite quit your day job just yet. You can increase that to 25p per song, if you’re willing to review specific genres that they dictate. The problem in that, is there’s a lot of drivel to sift though in order to come across a track that’s worth another listen. Through all of that, a huge plus is that they’re one of the few sites that pays in cash, via PayPal, not site credits used to buy music like on other similar ventures. It could prove an easy way to make a couple hundred bucks a year or so, if you’re a hobbyist at finding new music anyway. It’s free to sign up.

Where I think it could help, is in shaking things up on the A&R side of music. SliceThePie launched a sister site, SoundOut, which bands can use to find out what songs sit the best with the public. Songs on SliceThePie are anonymously submitted for reviews by users. Band and labels can use the service to find which singles from an album have promise. Investors can use the service to see what bands are on the rise. All that a band has to do is sign up on SliceThePie, and the data is automatically synched up with SoundOut.com.

With the meager earnings potential, I think the site will appeal more to younger crowds without larger responsibilities eating up their time. Due to that, I would expect that a lot of the music deemed “best” on the site will reflect a younger demographic. With all the success of Jonas Brothers, that might be exactly what the labels and investors are looking for though.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 4:13 pm. It is filed under wax and tagged with promotion, slice the pie, websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.