| Those of you who know me, know that I am 100% against PAYOLA, the practice of having to pay money in order to submit a song for music publishing considerations. Pretty much every single platform in existence requires musicians to pay a fee or a subscription in order submit their songs for publishing opportunities. The one exception to this rule is Tunedly.
The only thing we ask you to do is to upload songs that fit one of the five genres currently supported (Pop, Country, Rock, R&B/Soul, Hip-Hop/Rap) and that the song is of professional quality.
Unfortunately, we are receiving an increasing number of very poorly recorded songs. Songs with no lyrics/vocals, songs with no instrumental, noisy recordings, poor vocal or instrument quality, rough demo quality, etc. This is unacceptable. We have started removing songs that don’t meet certain quality standards and we will ban users who repeatedly upload sub-standard music. Look, we don’t care where you produce and record your songs you upload on the music discovery platform, Tunedly produced or not, it doesn’t matter to us, all we ask for is a certain level of professionalism.
While I still don’t support any form of PAYOLA, I start to understand why some of the other platforms require their users to pay a submission fee when uploading music for music publishing or sync license opportunities. I guess once a monetary consideration is added to the equation, a musician who has a song that clearly stands no chance in a professional environment would think twice about entering their song. Plus, in order to retain a certain quality for the music consuming audience, companies, including Tunedly, have to spend significant amounts of money on quality control and removing the bad apples.
We are NOT implementing a submission fee for music uploads on the music discovery app at this time. I wanted to first send out this email to our users and communicate this issue on the Tunedly blog. I will personally monitor the quality of uploads over the next month or so. If the quality does not improve, we may have to take the same approach as other platforms and charge a nominal submission fee for music uploads in the future. Please don’t be the person who spoils free submissions for everybody by submitting your cell phone recorded, off key, acapella soundalike of a 70s four track recorded garage band song.
All the best,
Chris Erhardt
CEO/Co-Founder
www.tunedly.com |
