Preying on Musicians

After my post yesterday I read a tweet with the following link http://www.chartfixer.com/. In a nutshell this is a service that buys your music off of itunes in bulk so your song will show up on the itunes chart. At the moment, the service is only available in Australia. Curiously I checked out the site and for them to buy 1000 downloads, it will cost you the low low price of $6000.00. So if we do the math, if you go through Tunecore as an aggregator, the band would receive $700.00 from the itunes store after Apple takes their 30 cents per track so in reality we have a real bargain now. The cost would only be $5300.00. The site addresses why you should use the service and mainly their reason is so you can get radio airplay, a record deal, a better record deal and so more people will hear your band. I understand that all of that sounds really appealing to a struggling band. I have been there. You feel you will do whatever it takes to get your piece of the pie. THIS WILL NOT DO IT. Lighting can and does still strike occasionally but your band has to realize that there aren't really any shortcuts. People have heard the story of how Gravity Kills had a record deal and were on two major motion picture soundtracks in the first 12 months from the time the band stepped into the same room together and called themselves Gravity Kills. What people don't talk about is the fact that I had been playing professionally for 12 years prior to joining the band. 


I fucking detest other "services" like The Billboard Songwriting Contest and www.wearelistening.org. These services simply prey on the hopes and dreams of musicians and take blood money from artists. The guy that founded we are listening .org actually stated in a panel that I did with him at dfest in Tulsa last year that the reason he started the service was because he found that musicians were still predominately doing google searches for "How to get a record deal." He was an expert on analytics and data mining. I can't slight the guy for taking money from the fools that decided to give it to him but WAKE UP PEOPLE, Don't be the next fool and don't rely on anything other than creating outstanding music and performing outstanding live shows. The next snake oil salesman is standing backstage.