Is Reverbnation a good citizen in the music industry?
Reverbnation who currently boasts the title of being the #1 music site on the internet leads artists to believe that their tools, gadgets and widgets can help an aspiring musician achieve maximum success using their services.
There’s no doubt that with over 2.7 million musicians, venues, labels, and industry professionals Reverbnation must be doing something right. But what Reverbnation is really doing might surprise you. ReverbNation has managed to successfully mislead an entire generation of musicians and music professionals now for more than half a decade.
While Reverbnation uses phrases like “Conquer the web - more fans, opportunities, gigs, stats, and money” to describe what they can do for artists everything comes with a cost on Reverb. To be a Rock star on the al-a-carte platform or at least to get the maximum use of their service ReverbNation offers a monthly subscription of $41.76 or $500.04 /per year, a generous 70% in savings as suggested by Reverbnation directly on their pricing page. But music is a business and one cannot be upset at Reverbnation for capitalizing on the market. What should disturb you is Reverbnation ‘s blatant disregard for the future of independent music, the artists they cater to and the 22 million unique visitors they mislead every month.
A closer look at ReverbNation revealed some very troubling facts to this writer that musicians should be weary of. The Reverbnation home landing page is always alive with fresh new faces of popular or top ranking artists on the music platform. These are usually the artists that rank in the top 10 positions in a specific region or part of the country; the motivational factor for an artist to sign up for an account. But something is very wrong with this system.
The music giant populates an artist’s rank using an algorithm that includes stats from other social sites such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. The problem with this: everyone knows that now a days you can buy twitter followers, Facebook likes and manipulate MySpace friends.
In the case of Cortez Carter (http://www.reverbnation.com/cortezcarter) for example Reverbnation reports that Cortez is the #1 ranked Hip-hop artist in Kansas City, KS. According to ReverbNation the Kansas rapper has plus or minus 130K twitter followers, 90K MySpace friends and 3K Facebook like, roughly 225K fans according to ReverbNation’s calculation.
Additionally Cortez has about 300 Reverbnation fans of which more than half are other Reverbnation artists and less than 1000 total song plays on his profile page. Cortez does not have his YouTube channel listed on Reverb so he is missing a few stats; his YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/CortezCarterHD has 1 subscriber out of his 225k total fans and roughly 390 views in total.
My intention is not to discredit Cortez Carter as an artist, but is he really the Best Hip-hop artist in Kansas City, KS? You decide.
Cortes Carter and the many artist’s like him that use the platform as their secret ingredient to make it mainstream should really take a closer look at what they are really getting from the #1 music site on the internet.
Independent musicians must be cautious in today’s market because of the many companies out there vying for their business dollars, but at what cost? There are a few promising companies emerging in this space that I am keeping an eye on one worth mentioning is www.aampp.net .You can read more about this new service here: http://www.prnewschannel.com/2012/12/27/social-music-network-connecting-musicians-music-professionals-fans-launches-this-week/
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