So, what exactly or approximately is going on here?

Songjury.com is a web based music distribution company for independent artists, where the listeners determine what songs are available on this site by a voting process called the Song Jury. The way it works is that artists agree to participate and then their songs are uploaded to the website to be evaluated in the Song Jury. The jurors log in to the song jury, listen to the song and vote on the songs on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest possible rating of the song’s quality. All songs ratings will be averaged after 8 independent ratings have been completed by jurors. All songs with a 70% or above approval rating will be posted to the artist’s page. They will be available for public download at that point. Songs are free. Our preference is that listeners tip artists using out ‘Tip Jar’ feature- much like you would do if you tipped an artists performing at a coffee house. After the cost of the transaction fees are taken out, the money is split 3 ways; 70% goes to the artist, 20% goes to a charitable nonprofit organization called Crossover Sound Waves Inc and 10% goes to the company. One program funded through the nonprofit helps families and individuals with micro-grants to help overcome problems related to accessing or sustaining housing.

What’s the Song Jury?

Any listener can be a Song Juror. All you need is an email account and a password and you will be able to log into the backend of the site and judge songs that are in the Jury Session. You can select your 3 favorite genres of music and will only be able to judge songs classified in those genres, or select ‘all’ which will let you sit in as a Juror for any song submitted. If you elect this, just make sure you don’t vote in genres of music you know you don’t like (people who don’t like the blues shouldn’t vote on blues songs).  Once you judge song, it will disappear from your list. A Jury Session is completed when 12 Jurors have voted. Songs with a 70% or above approval rating from at least 8 Jurors will be made available for sale on the site. Artists will be notified if a song does not make the grade.

Why don’t you use professional song critics?

Most songwriters crave feedback professional music critics however, we want listeners to run things when it comes to what’s available here. This is another revolutionary concept behind the philosophy of this site: ordinary people know whether or not they like a song without a music critic or a marketing department from a record label advising them to do so. People vote on music all the time in very tangible ways. When people listen to the radio in their cars and a song comes on they like, they turn it up; when a song comes up that they don’t like, they change the station or turn it down. Buying a CD, downloading a song, putting 50 cents in a jukebox to here a song or throwing a buck into the guitar case of a busker as they play music on the street; these are all forms of voting. We want fans to connect more directly with artists they like. This is part of the reason we attempt to narrow the field a bit in the Song Jury by trying to pair up Jurors with original songs from the genre of music they normally like to listen to. Nothing is perfect, and we will learn as we go, but this is where we’re starting.

A new service will be started in the future with professional songwriters, but this may be a ways off before it’s available on this site.

What’s up with the charitable bit?

The founder of the company is a follower of Jesus Christ and has worked as a Social Worker since 1986. Housing is a difficult thing to access for families coming out of homelessness, particularly in Santa Cruz County in California, where this company is based. Most people would agree that a car is no place to raise a family. Our shareholders are different in that they can be recipients of some of the proceeds from commerce on this site in a time of need.

This kind of approach will hopefully attract likeminded songwriters and listeners who would like to make some kind of a tangible difference for a family or a person that needs to have more options around housing. File sharing aficionados may be more inclined to pay for the music if they know some of the money is actually going to help people.

Why do you ask listeners to tip generously?

Part of the reason is economical as this is a start up. By the time you factor PayPal fees in, there would be very little to distribute between the artist, the company and the charitable nonprofit. There’s also the belief that fans of a given artist are willing to pay them money to create more great music. Fans of hypothetical artist, Billy, would rather have him spend more time in the studio recording and releasing more killer songs and work fewer hours delivering pizza to pay the bills (this will also create an employment opportunity for someone else to step into the pizza delivery gap thereby potentially reducing the unemployment rate and stimulating the economy). 

We are also endeavoring to make a difference in the community through the charitable work we are pioneering. If there is a little more money that goes into that fund, then more people can be helped.

Are songs on the website encoded with any Digital Rights Management (DRM) encoding?

Nope. That would cost money (and I tapped out my credit card to pay for the site as it is). The songs here are free range MP3s. There even seems to be a trend within the larger music industry to move away from DRM. There is also the reality that this company is not some huge record label with a large marketing department. It’s not even a label. A certain amount of viral marketing done informally through the web can be beneficial in exposing more people to great songs A listener that understands where the money is going may be more inclined to tip generously knowing that an artist they like is getting paid for their hard work, individual and families are going to be helped with housing related issues as a result of the tip and the site gets paid so it can remain online.   

There are some features that are not on the site yet that would make it more user-friendly. When do you plan to make those changes (this could cover a variety of possible features- by the way, please send us your feedback whenever this come up for you)?