Make a Music Supervisor Happy: Getting Unbiased Feedback
This part of the submission tips series “Make a Music Supervisor Happy” is about how to get unbiased feedback for your submissions. You can find a list of more helpful tips at the bottom of this post.
It’s very important to try to receive honest feedback about your work, as this helps you develop as an artist and gives you an idea of how people react to your music. It can also potentially demonstrate how music supervisors might receive your submission.
Sometimes honest feedback can be painful to hear, but that does not mean it’s not constructive. Here are a few tips on how to get unbiased feedback as a musician:
Look Beyond Your Friendship Circle
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell how catchy or how high the quality of your music is. Perhaps you have asked your friends and they all really liked your music. Unfortunately, your friendship circle does not represent wider listening audiences, they may have only heard of the music because of their relation to you and only like it because they are impressed by your work as a friend.
In order to gage just how popular your music will be with other audiences, the best thing to do is to approach people that you have never met before and ask them what they think of your music.
For instance, you could try some brief market research. You can do this either face-to-face or online. If you live in a big town or city, you could try surveying people on the street, playing your song for them, and asking them what they think of the music and the quality of it. Try to ask 10 different people. If less than half the people don’t think the quality is good enough or that the song is catchy, maybe consider working on your music before you send it in. If you don’t feel like asking people on the street, why not try asking people on the Internet. For example, you could try asking in one of the many Reddit music subreddits to find out if people online enjoy your music.
Compare Yourself to Others
Feedback is also important in testing how well your music will be received by music supervisors. It is important to compare it to other music – for example, in terms of quality. You can do this by asking people you don’t know to listen to your song and to another popular song from the same genre. Ask them to rate the two on quality. Take the responses into account when you work on your songs.
You can also do this comparison yourself, by being honest in comparing the quality of production. Research how others have made their music in order to see what both the competition is like and how your music can improve. A higher quality of music will make it more likely for your song to be chosen by a music supervisor.
Use Analytics Systems
You can also measure how popular your music is or what aspects you should change by looking at statistics and analytics programmes where you have uploaded your previous music. For example, if you have uploaded your music to YouTube you can pinpoint at which exact moment audiences are leaving your video with the ‘video retention rate’ analytic page.
While looking at analytics can be quite complex and time consuming, finding out the brief moment of when users are no longer listening to your music on YouTube can perhaps hint to where music quality or production could be improved.
Welcome Feedback from Outside Sources
To sum up, unbiased feedback is important as it lets you see how well your music is being received by other people and as a result, you can develop as an artist and improve your sound. It also provides the opportunity to gage how wider audiences and music supervisors will respond to your music.
Read more tips here:
Pitching with versatility
“Preview” tracks
Masterful mastering
Not using music samples
The question of cover versions
Timing and availability
Choosing relevant tracks
Song Titles
Choosing suitable lyrics and music
Stand out to potential clients