this article is as real as it gets.
Thanks for sharing all this with us

this is great to listen too..im updating my stuff now!!

Thanks for the good info. Things like this are extremely helpful and you should continue posts with information from promotors. It’s good to know where they are coming from.

Thanks!

Thank you for an informative and motivating pep talk.
Best, Bertrand Laurence.

great tips updated profile straight away!

Thanks for this insight. It’s invaluable to here from those who know!

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. It sure is helpful to hear the facts from the people who are doing the work. I am in the process of revamping our press kit and will certainly implement this advice!

Am I the only one who remembers the CMJ “standby” scam from last year?

S

Hi S:

Thanks for commenting, and I wanted to give some background on what happened with CMJ last year.

There is a tool in our promoter accounts called “Status Manager” which enables those who receive submissions (in this case, CMJ) to notify artists of their decision with one of the three statuses: Selected, Not Selected, or Standby. The tool was designed to send out notifications to artists at a time set by the promoter. The trouble and confusion stemmed from a bug in our system (since corrected) which failed to send out notifications to a number of submitting artists who were “not selected” at the correct time. When the artists eventually received the “not selected” message, it was very close to the event date. That, in conjunction with the fact that at the time our “hits tracker” was not built to track all the review-actions of a promoter (this, too, has been corrected), prompted a number of questions and concerns about CMJ.

To make sure this doesn’t happen in the future, we have corrected the “status manager” bug and updated the way our “hits tracker” functions. Sonicbids’ founder, Panos Panay, posted a response on September 27, 2007 (link below to that and to a response from the CMJ promoter as well), but we could and should have done a much better job communicating this to our members. The false rumors which claim that CMJ did not review the submissions that have spread are the result of us at Sonicbids not communicating this quickly enough, and we continue to apologize for the confusion this caused.

Sonicbids isn’t perfect, but we do listen to our members and you’ll soon see more changes that reflect the feedback we’ve received (the “hits tracker” was initially a member idea).

For more specifics, here is Panos’ message published on BrooklynVegan.com: http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2007/09/sonicbids_cmj_s.html - and here is CMJ’s post from two days prior to that: http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2007/09/cmj_responds_we.html

I hope this helps, and let me know if you have any questions at all.

Thanks,

Jenny

Like the above posts, i would like to thank you for a pretty good interview. What i don’t exactly get as with the SBSW, with so many bands performing - 1,100, what is the advantage of playing with so many other basically unknown groups? I love music and have worked to make a career at it for about 1/2 my life and i don’t think i could watch 15 bands a day for 7 days. That would only be a little over 100 viewed. On top of that, isn’t $45 is an huge investment for only the possibility of getting chosen? If i undersood correctly, domestic flight trans for US bands isn’t guaranteed and we’re mainly from CA. Using us as an example, that still leaves food, hotel, and 5 musicians trying to support their families.

Aside those concerns, this CMJ opportunity still has that “oh U might be seen by so and so” aura although i think submitting our band would just lead to a good try - you’re not selected. Yeh, our music is tight and we will tear it up with the best. However, after hearing your response about having an updated full calendar, it isn’t worth taking a chance because we currently cannot play out that often.

Thank you and applaud yer honesty,

Kabong

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=379170925

I enjoyed the interview and found it helpful. As I suspected an over 40 singer songwriter has no hope in these events. However when I started clicking on past winners on your site, every epk was de-activated. I tried about 20 randomly until I got annoyed enough to write this note.