Getting Feedback on 500+ songs

[Tripecac]

I'm curious if other people on here have this problem: not knowing how to start collecting feedback on a large number of songs.

I've uploaded more than 500 songs to my website. Most were completed using the same gear (Triton, Sonar, vocals and tiny bit of guitar).

My girlfriend and I both like listening to my music, but we're biased and patient with it (it seems to grow on us rather than grabbing us on first listen).

I've recently started to wonder whether any of the songs sound "nice" to people other than the two of us, or whether to other people's ears they all sound lame, like some kid's "refrigerator art".

(Honestly, I hate listening to other amateur musicians' songs. Most people's music sounds either too wimpy, too abrasive, too generic, too whatever... I just never seem to like it!)

So anyway, if I only had a few songs, it'd be easy to ask for feedback. But with 500+ I really don't know where to start in terms of collecting feedback. I never like my newest stuff, and my oldest stuff predates my current gear (Triton, Sonar) and habits. None of my songs or albums are perfect (ha!) to my ears, but most songs/albums are enjoyable in bits. They all have their highlights.

Well, I'm wondering if it's possible to find people willing to dig for those highlights. It's a lot of digging. Many, many precious hours would need to be sacrificed in order to get through the whole batch. That's like 50 hours just to listen to each song once. Most songs take a few listens before we start to like them. So let's say about 150 hours total listening. If you listen to 5 hours a day, that's about 30 days (including weekends).

Ughhh...

Well, I supposed I could just forget the whole "thorough review" idea and just trickle a few songs at a time onto MySpace like this:

http://www.myspace.com/tripecac

But that's only 4 songs, picked somewhat randomly (since I don't know which ones are "good"). How can I know which ones are good unless someone hears a whole bunch of them and then lets me know his/her favorites? But to do that I need to steer people towards my site, which has the 500+ songs (a very intimidating number of options).

Another possibility would be to start an mp3 blog about my music (or a mix of my music and other people's music), and gradually introduce songs (or albums) with requests for feedback. I created a proof-of-concept for that today:

http://tripecac.blogspot.com/

There's also GarageBand.com. It's a great site for getting reviews on individual songs, but it doesn't make it easy to get feedback on hundreds of songs. In order to submit a song for reviews (in the "contest"), you need to do 30 reviews of other people's songs. That's a lot of work! And then your songs, when they are reviewed, are only heard one at a time. This makes it impossible for people to hear and review your songs in an album context. So GarageBand is sort of a dead-end, at least for me. Here's my page if you are curious:

http://www.garageband.com/artist/tripecac

Any other ideas on how to start getting feedback for a large number of songs?

Trav

[Tripecac]

The Tripecac song "Stem" was selected as today's electronic "track of the day" on GarageBand.com. Here's some thoughts that I mailed to my parents and sister about it:

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Earlier this summer, I was trying to find someone who would be willing to listen to all 500+ Tripecac songs and gimme a thumbs up or down on each one. I posted this question to a forum and they recommended I check out GarageBand if I wanted feedback.

I submitted 3 songs to GarageBand; 2 were vocals and 1 was intstrumental. I let Giovanna pick one of the vocal songs, and I picked "Security" (from last year). I picked "Stem" as an instrumental because I thought it was pretty solid all the way through.

I was curious how the review system worked (since I have thought about adding something similar to my site), but wasn't really interested in getting in-depth feedback for those songs (or any songs for that matter). In order to get feedback on a song, you have to either pay $20 or review 30 other people's songs first. So I had to review 90 songs in order to get reviews on those 3 songs. That's a lot of work! I did a really thorough job at the reviews, though; people rated my reviews at "11" on a scale of 1 to 10 (I don't know how). I think they appreciated my reviews far more than they appreciated my music!

Anyway, as for the songs, people thought the vocals were either funny or irritating; on average, I think those songs got ratings of around 3 of 5 stars. People consistently liked the instrumental, though (4+ of 5 stars). Garageband said that enough people liked it for it to be selected as track of the day.

Getting strangers' feedback about those songs was an amusing sidenote more than anything else. I was far more interested in the mechanics of the review system than other people's opinions about my music.

I don't think any of that feedback has affected my song writing habits in the slightest, because I don't really care what those people like and dislike about my music. It's like getting feedback about the Honda; yes, I know it's ugly, stalls a lot, almost never has its back seats installed, and has a fiddly radio, but I like it because I can see well from it, I can sleep in the back, I can put my bike in it without worrying about scratching things, I can rest easy knowing it's not a target for thieves, and there's the sentimental factor: it's been with me to Alaska and back. Whether other people think the Honda is a "cool" car is of negligible interest to me. I like it, and that's what matter. Same with Tripecac.

However, what does interest me is finding out which of my songs other people like best. I am curious about my songs' relative (rather than absolute) appeal. To get that info, I need people to review lots of my songs, not just 1, 2, or 3.

With Garageband, I learned that if I want 500 of my songs reviewed (to get an idea of which ones people like best), then I can either review 15,000 songs by other people or pay $10,000. Ha! That's not how I want to spend my time/money, so I'll need to look somewhere other than GarageBand.

The side effect is that I learned a little about my music's absolute value (relative to other people's music). I don't think that's gonna affect my song-writing, though. I don't want my music to sound like other people's music. I just want it to sound fun and/or relaxing, within its own little musical genre-world thingie.

Make sense?

[Tripecac]

Okay, it's now almost 4 years later. I still haven't resolved the issue of how to get people to listen to my stuff.

I do have an idea, though, which is to create a new web site which presents compilations of Tripecac, Trex, etc. People can then go to that website to see recommended play lists. We can think of it as the "portal" or "lure". I could also make it more interactive, enabling people to easily create and annotate their own play lists.

I've yet to decide how it will look, though, and how to implement it.

[Tripecac]

I've added a rating system to the Tripecac, Trex, etc. sites. So finally I'm starting to collect some feedback! I still only have two primary raters (G and myself) but it's nice to have at least some feedback mechanism in place.