Ourstage: “Your tastes will not just generate exciting new music for you to discover, it will also help take deserving artists to the next level of their careers. So go ahead and let your ears decide tomorrow’s hit-makers today. ”
A popularity contest for musicians?
No Trackbacks
You can leave a trackback using this URL: http://newmusicstrategies.com/2009/02/03/ourstage-2/trackback/
3 Comments
My music has been getting a pretty good response at Ourstage, but I haven’t seen any increase in traffic to my website or direct sales from it.
We came 1st with our video for ‘Would Love To Meet’ in the Rock Video category back in November. $100 worth of Amazon books just arrived as our prize. We’re not at all ungrateful, but so far that’s as much good as has come from the site. YouTube gets us tens of thousands of potential fans seeing our stuff, OurStage is largely musicians and their friends listening and watching to other musicians and their friends as far as we can work out. I really think that most band’s ‘please come to this new site and vote for me’ favours have all run out by now. We don’t plan on entering any more contests for that reason.
Ourstage is a joke. Why? Read below…
I do not usually do that, but this time I think it is too important to be disregarded.
Who do they think they are at Ourstage? First, they remove the Spoken Word category. Then, what happens? Those artists are forced to enter their tracks in other categories. When they start ranking well, the songs are automatically removed. This is the usual email that staff send:
“Hi XXX,
We have received several messages from OurStage Fans who say that your song ‘XXXX’ doesn’t belong in the XXXXX channel. We reviewed your song and our definition of the channel (http://www.ourstage.com/about/faqs), and it doesn’t belong there. As a result, we have removed your song from competition in our XXXX channel.
You are welcome to find a more appropriate channel for this song, or to submit a new song which fits the channel description more closely. Feel free to write us back if you have any questions or concerns.
Everest, Karl Community Manager E: everest@ourstage.com OurStage.com”
This has happened to me twice this week. Every time, I was in the top 50 (out of 200-300 entries!) of the category. And every time, I received the same e-mail and my track was removed without warning.
I talked to a few Spoken Word artists, and the same thing has happened to them. Why is that? I will tell you.
Ourstage is a money-hungry website that uses hypocritical ideas to get publicity. They want to help independent artists and save the world from mediocre music. Give me a break. We have complained countless times about rappers and other musicians spamming our channel with tracks that did not belong to the Spoken Word category. Nothing was done, no track was ever removed. Instead, our channel was removed with no warning.
Ourstage, it is time you stopped disrespecting artists. Either you give a chance to all of us or you change your policy. Yes, we have no money to give you, but we work hard to upload tracks that will bring traffic to your website. You get publicity from it, while not even being grateful for our hard work.
Let’s stop this nonsense right now. It is ridiculous!