My partner is a part-time composer, and we’re currently debating amongst ourselves as to whether the $300/year fee for Taxi is a good investment to make at this point in her career. She has a number of pieces that are very close to being strong submissions for various “instrumentals wanted” postings on the Taxi site.
Any Doper musicians reading who are members of Taxi or other similar sites? What do you think of it/them? Has anyone hired you through such services?
Is this sort of investment like having kids, in that there is never the “right” time, and you just have to plunk down the benjamins and see how it goes?
I’m currently digging through my old mail to find a few other similar sites that have been recommended to us in the past.
Any advice/encouragement/cautionary tales appreciated.
Have you already explored the free options, MySpace and YouTube? There are plenty of budding filmmakers looking for music, and the time invested in managing a MySpace account and adding them as “Friends” can get you at least a contact list. While parts of MySpace are filled with barely literate people looking to sex partners, there are any number of talented filmmakers and musicians. Any social networking site is only the connections you make. I see musicians and filmmakers create work to post to YouTube all the time who have never physically met.
It’s possible you could get music into a game or ultra-low budget film. It might not result in any cash, or only in a share of theoretical profits but any credit is better than none and at least you wouldn’t actually be in the hole as you would with Taxi.
Put yourself in the shoes of a struggling filmmaker: Would you pay money to get in touch with a composer, or would you first try all the non-commercial options?
She’s been on Myspace for some time, and has not had many (if any) nibbles from anyone, be they starving filmmakers with no money or TV commercial folks. She also has original works (and collaborations) on icompositions.com and macjams.com.
We haven’t tried the Youtube angle yet. Do they compromise audio quality like they compromise video quality? Do we have to have an actual video of something, or can the song play while the listener just watches her website url scroll across the screen?
What is appealing about Taxi is that paying parties (who are specifically looking for the types of music that she composes) basically place anonymous wanted ads. You send a cd or upload some demos, and if the client likes you, a deal is brokered through Taxi.
She is interested in working in film, even if it is for little or no money, but she has commercially viable skills as well and there are people with money out there looking for commercially viable music.
Thanks. We did the Taxi thing for a few years and she submitted about 15 times, she got feedback for a handful of those, which was useful, and was passed along to the prospective client for a handful more but never selected. There just doesn’t seem to be much demand for the type of music that she writes coming through their system. Not enough leads to justify the money at least, especially in light of my getting laid off last year. We’re both working, but we have significantly less money to work with now.
As such, we’ve switched gears to producing and distributing an album that should be going out the door here in the next month or so. We’re taking advantage of some packages with musicmakers/cdbaby and it will be going out as downloads on iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon etc, cds on Amazon, and submission to Pandora and other online radio sites. She’s been composing steadily for the past 6 years and has at least 3 or 4 albums worth of material in her portfolio, so it just seems the way to go versus the very occasional hits on TAXI.
Thanks for the link and review about A&R. We’ll check them out.