BE SIMON COWELL!! : Earn cash from rating new music

emmah89

hey

ive just joined, and am currently listening to my first song on it, and its actually really good!! this is perfect for me, I love listening to music and its great to be able to find out about new bands etc.

:j:j:j:j

pop_gun

i've just joined as well. for some reason i can't add any of the song to the playlist. the music player won't give me access to the + and the tick sign on the right hand side (which i assume is how i add to the watchlist).

p.s. when does the site update so i know i got a rating or some money?

artyannat

This definitely isn't a quick way to make money. They've obviously changed the rules since it started as I signed up yesterday newbe's only get the chance to earn vouchers at 4p per track to start with. Two stars gets you 5p vouchers but it's not until you get three stars that you start earning actual cash. I've already reviewed over 50 tracks and I'm still on one star. I've done all the things you're supposed to such as Tipping artists and I've used my vouchers to 'invest' in artists.

I enjoy listening to the music so I'll stick with it for a while, but after about six hours of using the site I'm starting to wonder if it's worth it.

davester

They changed the rules about christmas 08 and made it really difficult and so unfair for scouts to earn anything worth your effort. Basically some very old scouts that started when it was really new, abused the system and made a fortune by colaborating and keeping ratings between 4-7 making the accuracy high for all that did it. STP introduced spread meaning your random 31 tracks had to have a good spread of 1-10 or you would lose stars and earnings. After the newspapers heard of it just before they changed the rules so the report was wrong they had an influx of newbies out for a quick £5 with very poor reviews. They then introduced Vouchers which can be used to fund the bands only to stop this. So now its not worth the effort to make money from, I can earn more from Toluna than STP now. When with the old system I was on £5 a day

jasonwatkins

davester wrote: »

They changed the rules about christmas 08 and made it really difficult and so unfair for scouts to earn anything worth your effort.

True, but then the site is technically supposed to be about discovering new artists and getting them financed. Slicethepie did themselves no favours at all when they accepted the mantle of "money making website".

Martin Lewis also did them no favours by recommending them as a "top money making website".

Eventually, the number of people using the site for it's actual purpose was massively eclipsed by people just wanting to use it to make money at the expense of the artists.

davester wrote: »

They then introduced Vouchers which can be used to fund the bands only to stop this.

Vouchers have always been there - just that nobody ever used them.

I personally think the fatal blow to that website was the release of the sales figures for financed artists.

Every contract just went through the floor. The vouchers that were supposed to be worth £1 each were barely worth 10p - i had £70 quid's worth of vouchers invested in a band which i eventually sold for £5.40.

I read on their forum that they're apparently going to start paying people in US currency, which, in my opinion, is a sure sign they're in trouble. They'll be paying out less money due to the exchange rate, but they'll probably make some half-hearted gesture about raising scout payments to compensate.

I gave up on the site months ago - I still occasionally pop back to post random messages on the forum but i don't scout any more and i'd probably even go as far as to say i'd actively discourage people from doing the same if they're just looking to earn money because it really isn't worth the effort.

davester

The vouchers for 1, 2 and sometimes 3 stars came after the introduction of Spread before it was all cash value. The vouchers I think your refering to are the ones you got for tipping a band that made it to the showcase which I always use. If they didn't want people to make money scouting then the simple thing would be to have vouchers for all star levels but they knew most people will want to have something for their effort. I still have some contracts which I haven't bothered to sell to anyone for 10p or whatever they are now, because I could redeem the money if i did.
Way back when I emailed STP about the spread and how unfair it was to scouts and band members, basically because every scout had a random track playlist so scouts either had a fixed rating style and just hoped they didn't have a long run of similarly rated tracks, which happened quite regularly. Or you had a rolling scale of rating which meant that an average rating from the fixed style would be rated higher or lower depending on where it fell in your last 31 random tracks which the accuracy took a hit because that is based on the fixed style of rating. This could easily cause a band to miss out on the getting through to the next stage.
STP replied adimant that the main influence of star rating was the quality of the review. Which was a total pile of ..... because I bothered to learn some technical words and used them in 10+ line reviews, This meant I was doubling the time I took for reviewing rather than when I was writing 6 line reviews, however regardless of that I still had the same up and down rating where I would jump from 1 star to 3-4 stars because of the rating I gave. In the end I got sick of wasting my time listening to bands that couldnt be bothered to do a half decent recording, and see my efforts dwindle from the £5 a day to less than £1. I had in the past used the money earnt very early to help fund a band, but like most scouts we spend time and effort to rate 10000+ tracks and then be stiffed at the end. The members that abused the system should have just been banned and they should have used spread for checking on abuse rather than using it to kick a good scout down just because they have been given an large batch of similar rated music. I remember many days of listening to 60 tracks of hip hop all very similar in quality and would be rated very close. So I would either fiddle the rating to appease spread and drop in accuracy, or keep accuracy up to around 96% which I was before and sit on 1 star untill the tracks start to be more varied.

I could understand they didn't want new people to come and make a quick buck and quit again, but the long standing members which put effort into their reviews was in the end kicked in the teeth.

jasonwatkins

i managed to find a good middle ground with it - i was making enough per day to invest a decent amount in artists, but also to have enough left over per month to be able to afford to add sky sports to my package when I was with sky.

i've always maintained that they should have a fixed level of payments for everyone - a few pence per track and that's it. Then, have the voucher payments increased significantly and offer rewards for using them and investing them.

at least that way you'd potentially get things moving again.

look at the comparisons of financed artists .. 12 in 2008, 7 in 2009 and ONE this year.

And it's been over a year since any financed artist has released an album, so you have to ask yourself - what exactly is the point ?

mrkl

where do you go to rate these bands, i m going round in circles