Your Song is a Dead Ox. Be the CIA.
A message to musicians about the wisdom of crowds
I was speaking recently to a musician about a new song they were in the process of recording, it had just come back from mixing and was almost finished. Having heard a ton of music in the capacity of a songwriting contest judge and music-startup-person, I have to say, this song really wasn’t all that great. The vocals were too low in the mix and a bit off-key (“we can’t use autotune!”), the verse transitioned awkwardly into the chorus, and one of the rhythm guitars was a bit out of tune. And I did my best to give some criticism gently, but I wasn’t honest — let’s face it, I wanted to support a friend and give him confidence, and who knows if people even care about an out of tune rhythm guitar anyway?
This led me to re-ponder a question that plagues me personally as an artist, and the question that epitomizes the central problem we set out to solve:
What do people really think about my song?
You can play your song for a friend, a family member, or a fellow musician, and ask them for an honest opinion. In fact, in our research before starting this project, we found that statistically you probably do this every time you work on a new song. God knows I do, I’m sure my friends and family are sick of listening to my half-finished riffs (on totally wrong speakers for the mix).
But the reality is your friends and family are going to tell you they like it because they want to be supportive. Your musician friend is going to find something obscure to comment on that could be improved to show he’s just as musician-y as you are. And maybe they’re all correct, maybe they aren’t. But what they’re giving you are opinions, not the truth. For the truth, we decided to turn to a fascinating sociological force — the wisdom of crowds. The following is from a recent NPR article on the subject:
The wisdom of crowds is a concept first discovered by the British statistician Francis Galton in 1906.
Galton was at a fair where about 800 people had tried to guess the weight of a dead ox in a competition. After the prize was awarded, Galton collected all the guesses so he could figure out how far off the mark the average guess was.
It turned out that most of the guesses were really bad — way too high or way too low. But when Galton averaged them together, he was shocked: The dead ox weighed 1,198 pounds. The crowd’s average: 1,197.
The CIA actually figured out how to use this force as a prediction tool for world events by surveying thousands of normal, non-spying citizens in an experiment called the Good Judgement Project. The results were astounding — normal citizens regularly “outpredicted members of the United States intelligence community with access to classified information.” It’s a testament to the power of the wisdom of crowds. So how can we tap into this power, and how do we use it to gain insight into what people really think about a song?
The weight of a dead ox is objective, but music quality isn’t necessarily. Sometimes great production is lo-fi, sometimes great singers are out of tune. There are no “good” and “bad” songs, there are just songs. Personally, my definition of a “good” song is any song that makes people feel. But we didn’t create Audiokite Research to tell you if your song is “good” or “bad,” we created it to tell you the truth.
An example of the “Song Elements” section of a report from Audiokite Research — click here to learn more.
There exists an answer to the question of whether or not your song will perform commercially, and we’ve figured out a way to answer that question with the wisdom of crowds. At Audiokite Research, we’re leveraging Amazon Mechanical Turk’s crowdsourcing power to deliver valuable insight into the potential of songs by independent musicians and labels, and we’ve gone to great lengths to keep it affordable.
We’re a company of musicians, and when we saw the research options currently available, there was nothing comprehensive or affordable enough. And as we see more reports come back and receive more feedback from our customers, it’s obvious that we’re the best thing out there. But don’t take my word for it, check out this recent article in Passive Promotion where award-winning musician Brian Hazard says our reports are “the best market research for musicians I’ve seen yet, and bests SoundOut and ReverbNation’s Crowd Review in several key areas.”
“There’s a lot of noise, a lot of statistical random variation,” Tetlock said. “But it’s random variation around a signal, a true signal, and when you add all of the random variation on each side of the true signal together, you get closer to the true signal.”
Your song is the dead ox, so be the CIA. Because once you find your true signal, you can stop guessing when it comes to your music promotion and start knowing.
Click here to learn more about how Audiokite Research can help you improve your music.
