By: Matt Wright

Hello and welcome to the second in our series of interviews with the people behind the awesome companies that make up the IODA Partner Program.  As always, this program is available to all IODA rightsholders via their label dashboard, allowing them/you to connect with a hand-selected mix of next-generation music marketing tools.  Today we’re talking to Sharmita Saha from music analytics/research company SoundOut.  Also, make sure to check out our interview with Charles Fienn from iPhone appmakers Mobbase if you missed it.  OK, let’s do this!

Can you give me some background on the SoundOut team?  Where you guys are from, what you did before this, that kind of thing.

There are a few of us. David Courtier- Dutton is the founder and CEO of Slicethepie and SoundOut and his background is in Law and Corporate Finance. Back in 2005 he identified the structural challenges being faced by the traditional music industry and began working on the fan-funding site Slicethepie, which now powers SoundOut.

In 2008 he developed the idea for SoundOut with our Head of A&R Daniel, who before joining the company was in a band for a number of years (signed to Arista, Sanctuary and Epic) and now also continues to work on the side as a manager of an up and coming singer-songwriter so he comes at the industry from an artist marketing perspective which has been integral to us developing SoundOut as a viable tool to aid this.  And of course, there’s James our in-house tech genius who built SoundOut and whose analytics background enables us to make sense of all the valuable data we collect from reviewers for SoundOut.

I head up bizdev and partner relations for SoundOut. My background is in sales and marketing originally for a technology research & consulting company in London and San Francisco, and then in similar roles at start up and consumer internet companies. My other half was in a band for many years which toured the US themselves 11 times in 3 years!; and the first band that marketed themselves on the UK social network Bebo, so this gave me a real insight into the music industry from an indie artist perspective.

Can you give us a brief overview of what SoundOut is?

SoundOut is a fast and cost effective way for artists and labels to get objective feedback & accurate market analytics on their tracks, directly from music fans and consumers.

The system uses advanced technologies to aggregate and analyze the ratings and reviews, and delivers a report which indicates how good the track is as to its commercial potential (with 95% accuracy), how it positions against other tracks in its genre, what the strong and weak elements of the track are (e.g. vocals, guitar, lyrics), what demographics it resonates with; and it includes the direct feedback from the reviewers.

This insight can be used to support the right decisions around track selection for singles, albums and promo, what improvements should be made to tracks pre-mixing or mastering and what markets to target the artist/track to in order to maximise fan acquisition.

We’re developing SoundOut’s predictive marketing feature at the moment that will take the service a step further and provide marketing recommendations for users.

Sharmita Saha of SoundOut

In the past you’ve mentioned how SoundOut leverages the concept of “crowdsourcing”.  Can you explain what crowdsourcing is, and how it relates to SoundOut?

We use crowdsourcing to enable “Wisdom of Crowds”, which is the approach behind our core analysis and how SoundOut can guarantee 95% accuracy in track ratings.

Both crowdsourcing (a process of outsourcing a single job to a large, undefined group of people) and Wisdom of Crowds are phenomena of people working together through the web, and turning consumers into producers.

Wisdom of Crowds is the proven methodology that large groups of ordinary people organised under the right conditions (a “smart crowd”), outperform small groups of experts in making decisions and predictions.

It’s not new. It is the science behind Google and decision-making in some of the largest companies in the world. It has been proven time and again that collective wisdom consistently surpasses the experts.

The 4 criteria of a “smart crowd” are:

1) Diversity of opinion: A sample group of reviewers with many different points of view makes better decisions than one where everyone has the same information.

2) Independence: The reviewers’ opinions are not influenced by others.

3) Decentralization: Answers are given by individual reviewers based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by a central person.

4) Aggregation: We provide a way of accurately measuring the sample group’s collective answer.

For more info on this you can check out our FAQs on www.soundout.com.

How do the reviewers on SoundOut find the tracks to be reviewed, and what motivates them to leave a review?  Are they compensated?

Every track submitted to SoundOut for analysis is fed randomly in real time to a sample group of reviewers from our sister site, Slicethepie.

The reviewers on Slicethepie are genuine music fans and consumers from all over the world. They have no axe to grind, no hidden agenda and no other reason not to give their honest opinion.  They are paid to rate the track 0-10 and write a free text review. The artist and track name are only revealed after the review has been submitted (although there is also an option to keep this confidential).

Each of the individual reviewers are personally rated on their ability to predict the broader market view of a track – the better they are at this, the more weight their opinion carries and the more they get paid per review. SoundOut reports reveal the star rating (quality) of each reviewer beside each review.

Are there any success stories or best practices you’d like to share?

Yes, a few actually! J One of the top rated SoundOut artists, Scars on 45, who also raised finance to record and market an album using our Slicethepie platform, signed a multi-album deal with Chop Shop/Atlantic Records this year which was fantastic news.

And another regular SoundOut user, indie artist Nicol has a single out with M’Black which was #1 in the US Billboard Dance Airplay Charts and has stayed in the top 5 for the last 6 weeks – the track “Heartbreak” got a SoundOut rating over 8 which indicated it would have great success.

Also, we can’t disclose names, but one of the major labels recently put 6 tracks through SoundOut from a new album (by a very well known artist) that they were just about to release.  We ranked the tracks in order of their SoundOut ratings, and the positioning of a particular track (a cover version) took their A&R and marketing teams by surprise as their opinion, which followed that of the traditional market research they also had conducted, was that this cover track would not be as well received over some of the others.   A few weeks after the album had been released we compared our SoundOut ranking of the 6 tracks with their respective rankings on iTunes, and we were pleased to see that the order of their SoundOut rating vs. iTunes sales mapped almost exactly, including the cover track in question, demonstrating SoundOut’s accuracy over traditional market research techniques (and again that Wisdom of Crowds really does work)!

Is there a certain kind of artist or label that you think SoundOut is most useful for?

We conducted a survey recently and the artists and labels that have used SoundOut and said they found it valuable are split equally between niche, mainstream and both, with over 80% of them saying they would recommend SoundOut to others.

SoundOut is a great tool to test any new track with a commercial audience but we also show the track’s position against others in its specific genre and whether the track has broad or niche appeal.

For example, a niche track with an average overall track rating, might have a high classification within its genre and a divided consensus of opinion which would actually indicate a positively distinctive track that has strong potential in the right target market.

There’s been a lot of talk about how digital music is bringing about a shift in focus from album to tracks.  SoundOut seems geared toward individual songs.  Is this a conscious reaction to the digital music landscape?  Where do albums fit into the SoundOut platform?

It wasn’t a conscious reaction, SoundOut was always built to test and provide analysis on individual tracks as these can differ quite wildly even on the same album.

However, SoundOut is most powerful when used to comparison test a number of tracks by the same artist and so our multi-track packs are designed to allow users to test whole EPs or albums in order to make decisions around track selection for radio play, single release or before mixing or mastering and to identify the target markets for specific tracks, and broadly for an artist. We offer discounts of 20-30% on these multi-track packs to keep this as cost-effective as possible.

For more details you can contact me at sharmita@soundout.com

Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us Sharmita!  Everyone should feel free to send questions to the email above, and you can also learn more at the SoundOut website.  IODA clients  can get 25% off their first SoundOut report purchase by using the discount count available in the Partners tab of the label dashboard.