A&R Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourced music financing site Slicethepie will launch today a new web service called SoundOut. Apparently the service will crowdsource the A&R-type ratings of music. SoundOut is aimed at labels and artists who want to test a song prior to release in order to understand what the audience will like. For $20 to $50 users can upload a song and have it rated anonymously by Slicethepie users. 24 hours after uploading the song the uploader gets a detailed report that rates how various target markets reacted to the song (screenshots of a report are available to see here via Wired). The founder ambitiously claims that SoundOut should enable labels to efficiently test the market prior to signing/recording/releasing an artist.
From the report, labels should be able to understand whether a song caught on with listeners, measure the market potential of an artist as well as get an objective view on which songs work with which audience. According to wired, no major label has committed to use SoundOut program yet, but TuneCore plans to offer SoundOut to its users. Artists will have the option to invest TuneCore revenue in a SoundOut test without dealing with the withdrawal process. We will have to wait and see if labels will embrace the service. Wired says:

Record labels desperate to cut costs while still signing the occasional new
artist have ample reason to try Slicethepie's SoundOut service. Whatever's left
of their A&R departments can almost certainly use the help. And if they need
further evidence that A&R can be crowdsourced, they need look no further
than American Idol. By listening to the crowd before investing, American Idol
creator Simon Fuller has consistently outperformed "experts" who rely solely on
their own ears.