Summary: This week on Digital Music Trends an interview with David Courtier-Dutton, the CEO of SoundOut (http://www.soundout.com) a super-interesting company that provides labels, musicians and radio stations with an insight into how a track might perform commercially. SoundOut was recently nominated in the Best Innovation or Gadget category at the BT Digital Music Awards 2011. SoundOut has created a community of Scouts that built up via word of mouth - they are encouraged to evaluate each track based on how well they think it will do commercially rather than on whether they personally like it or not. The Scouts are paid a small fee (2 to 20 cents depending on how good they are) for each review they post and the review themselves are evaluated by the company’s semantic technology to check on how good they are. Based on these reviews SoundOut is able to generate reports at different levels of complexity - starting at just $30 for the Standard report which contains 80 reviews delivered within 5 days all the way to $149 for the Pro report which contains a whole host of additional information as well as 200 review, demographic analysis, possibility to isolate UK or US reviewers etc. If you’d like to download a sample report check out http://www.soundout.com/Gallery/126.pdf. It seems like a very interesting way to go about looking at the commercial viability of a track and with large radio stations and labels regularly commissioning SoundOut reports it looks like they’ve tapped into the right market, let me know what you think! Well that’s all for this week, I really hope you enjoyed the show. Please remember to visit www.digitalmusictrends.com for previous shows or you can follow me on twitter, the handle is digimusictrends. Have a great week and ‘till next time!
