Are you a DJ wanting to easily measure how well your career is progressing doing online? We’re talking online stores, streaming sites, social media and and so on? Perhaps you’re a venue or promoter wondering which artists are blowing up right now, in order to make smart bookings for your events? Subscription service Viberate is aimed at you.
Viberate checks the performance of DJs and artists on “relevant online channels”, and lets you claim your online profile, a bit like you can claim a business on Google Maps. It currently has outline profiles of 37,000 artists, and when you sign up (you can register and try a stripped down version of the service for free), you can add yourself should you not already be know to Viberate.
As an artist, you can then link your profile to relevant channels, and use it to “analyze your career, monitor your performance and compare yourself to others”, following your progress over time, and seeing “how promotional campaigns influence your fan following and engagement check which labels and musicians follow your career”.
The intention is also that promoters, event bookers and the like can use the information on Viberate to choose who they book. It is possible to sort by DJ price, country and genre, and the developers promise that record labels and venues will soon be added too, so everyone can be popularity checking each other: DJs can check which is the right label to approach to release their latest tune, labels can scout for producers, venues for DJs, and so on.
“Music is about taste, and if enough people like it, you win. But how do you know what people like? Let Viberate help you with that…” say the developers, promising that “we’ll reach for other genres to create the most comprehensive music intelligence service on the market.”
• You can try out Viberate on its website here for free, and for the full unrestricted version, it costs $15 monthly.
First thoughts
This has grown out of the Topdeejays service, and done properly, this kind of thing has to be better than simply judging DJs (and later, venues and record labels) on a kind of ad hoc scan around their Facebook Pages and so on.
While a healthy debate continues to be necessary about how much artists, event bookers and record labels should make decisions from a place of passion and gut instinct against one of data, there is definitely room for such tools in the overall picture.
Viberate appears to have laid the infrastructure for growing into a useful dashboard / networking / intelligence tool that may become increasingly relevant in a unified, global scene.
Are you registered on Viberate? Will you be heading over there to claim your free profile? Or do you get exasperated by how important online metrics have become in today’s world, preferring to kep your promotion “grass roots”? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
Phil Morse
