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How fans can grab a slice of the music pie
Q&A: Slicethepie founder, David Courtier-Dutton

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Monday 18 February 2008

Slicethepie has been running since June 2007 and gives music fans the opportunity to review new music and finance the bands they want to make it big. It also gives bands unprecedented access to accurate and valuable feedback from the music public.

silicon.com spoke to founder David Courtier-Dutton to get the lowdown on Slicethepie and how it is taking on the traditional music industry as well as his thoughts on Radiohead's recent pay-what-you-like online album release.

How Slicethepie works
Courtier-Dutton: Essentially we turn every user on the website into a fully fledged record label. By fragmenting the music industry in that way we allow everybody to decide in their own way who gets financed, which bands make it, where they put their money in, how much money they get out of it.

Artists upload three tracks to the site and a few very basic details about themselves and when we've got groups of 1,000 artists together we kick off what we call a 'scout room'. Users are presented with a music player that randomly streams them tracks from the 1,000 artists - without disclosing the artist name or the name of the track - after which they submit a review and score for the track.

Broadband from A to Z

Click on the links below to find out more...

A is for ADSL
B is for BT
C is for Cable & Wireless
D is for Dial-up
E is for Education
F is for Fibre
G is for Goonhilly
H is for HSDPA
I is for In-flight
J is for Janet
K is for Kingston
L is for Landlines
M is for Murdoch
N is for Next generation
O is for Ofcom
P is for Power lines
Q is for Quad-play
R is for Remote working
S is for Satellite phones
T is for Trains
U is for Unbundling
V is for VoIP
W is for WiMax
X is for Xbox
Y is for YouTube
Z is for Zombies

Cash for reviews
People get paid a few pence for each review they do and the better they get at reviewing the more they get paid per review. You get better at reviewing by scoring consistently closer to the average score given by everyone else who's scored that particular track. You're in tune with the crowd shall we say. It's the key A&R [artists and repertoire] skill I suppose - to guess actually what other people will like. You also get more stars as a scout so you also get more influence - your vote is worth two or three times that of a less reliable scout.

At the moment money [for reviews] comes from us but we will be introducing advertising in the next six months that will cover the cost of that. Once we get that right, the great thing is that we can then do a much scouting as we like because the cost is covered.

The showcase
Artists walk away [from the scout room] with typically around 150 reviews from music fans per track. We then take the top two per cent of artists from the scout room in terms of score and we put them in the next stage which we call the showcase. Now if the scout room is all about finding the best melody and the best performances, the showcase is about finding out which artists have got the oomph and the wherewithal to go and pick up support from a fan base.

The showcase runs for three weeks and it's a simple 'get out there and get people voting for you' situation. So all the bands go out and drum up as much support as they can - and a lot of them to date have got TV and press and God knows what else. And then every band in the showcase that has enough support will then go onto financing. It's not a sort of X-Factor, it's about if you've got enough support to get financed, then you will go forward and get financed.

Financing and going 'backstage'
In the financing stage, we put up 3,000 'backstage passes' which are £5 coupons that entitles the buyer to a free copy of the album and participation in the making [of] the album in terms of getting close to the artists, regular updates, shots from the studio etc. The artist who comes first [in the showcase] is always guaranteed the £15,000 regardless of how many they sell.

Sharing success
The twist here is that if investors fund the artist, they also get the right to buy five contracts [which] cost 10p each and carry the rights to a share in the royalties from the album - but you can only get them at 10p if you first finance the artist.

The way you value a contract is they pay out an amount for every 1,000 albums sold over a two-year period. So basically if an artist sells more than 1,000 albums you will start making money on your contract.

[Contracts] are then freely tradable on a trading exchange on the side, so it's like a stock market. Typically if you look at the exchange on the site today, I think the lowest cost for a contract is about 60p and the highest about £2. These are all contracts that have been bought for 10p each over the last few months so you get a huge boost in terms of value if you finance the artist.

Check out slicethepie's latest success stories and David Courtier-Dutton thoughts on Radiohead's online experiment on the next page.