Broadjam

[mhschmieder]

I was surprised that only three ancient unrelated posts came up when I searched for Broadjam across the forums.

Anyway, I'm wondering what people know about the "place" that broadjam has in the music business?

Is it a combination of serious and not-so-serious? Is it industry-associated? Is it a free-for-all or by invite only?

I had heard a little about Broadjam before, but had to join in order to vote in the TEC Awards last week.

Then I started getting emails soliciting material that matches reall well with lots of my oprhaned works.

Some of those were done for potential clients that either flaked, rejected, disappeared, or didn't follow up.

I'm wondering if broadjam is worth the effort, and if so, whether cherry-picking the postings helps.

I'm just too naive right now to know if it's a combination of pros and non-pros, or mostly one or the other.

From the solicitations, it sounds like the Music Business, and maybe a good way to hook up talent with clients?

[mhschmieder]

This is what I found about them at a business rating site:

"About Broadjam.com (broadjam.com): Broadjam Inc. provides web-based technology, software and services for the music industry and independent musicians around the world. The company operates one of the world’s largest web communities for musicians and hosts a massive online database of searchable independent music. Broadjam.com also offers artist services such as turnkey website hosting and desktop promotional tools. The Broadjam Pro Services group designs and builds custom technology for music industry clients such as Warner/Chappell"

[mhschmieder]

It's probably against copyright rules to cut/paste from this article, but it dates back to 2001 shortly after broadjam was formed, and provides some insight into the various histories and success rates of different on-line hosting and socuting communities:

http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_keep_download/

And Mix magazine has an historically interesting announcement on-line of the original creation of Broadjam:

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_mix_daily_news_17/

I also see TAXI and Broadjam linked a lot on other sites, in single-click actions, so it is beginning to look like Broadjam has many purposes but that one of them is to serve as sort of an on-line conduit for TAXI.

OTOH they might have no relation to each other after all, and some sites may just make it easy to handle the two biggest license managers in one fell swoop. Here's a more recent article that also mentions some other newer alternatives:

http://www.the-motion-sick.com/2008/10/ ... nsing.html

The founder of Broadjam was a Director at Ensoniq for many years, and seems to have more direct exposure and contact with real musicians than some of the other similar services for songwiters and composers, so maybe that says something in Broadjam's favour.

[mhschmieder]

Just as I was preparing to post my first submissions to a Broadjam contest, I clicked far enough into the site to get cold feet when I saw there is a $20/song submission fee.

I wouldn't mind, except that the contests are so vaguely worded, and so rarely list references to get you an idea of what they are looking for, that it seems high risk. If the contests were far more detailed in their wording, I'd feel more sure that I have a close match for the requirements, and wouldn't mind the $20 entry fee.

The other thing that throws me off is that all of the contests are looking for songs, not compositions or soundscapes. So does that mean even if they say avant-garde that they are strictly looking for compositions that fall into the category of a song (whether sung or not)?

I do have one instrumental song I was going to submit (it works well without the lyrics and so meets the contest's overall requirements of high energy dance-oriented etc.), but my main interest in such avenues of licensing is to find homes for my non-song material such as soundscapes for horror and science fiction films, and that is one of the contests I had planned to send to.

Maybe it's like iTunes though, where everything is considered a "song" -- including short snippets of spoken word that might be bite-sized enough to sell as a 99-cent MP3?

[mhschmieder]

So I wasted time a couple of weeks ago navigating my user account to unsubscribe from everything, and I'm getting more emails from them than ever. I guess the only way is to cancel the account.

Geesh, all of this because I wanted to vote to help my employer win a few TEC awards (which it did).