For all music enthusiasts, making money while listening to a couple of tunes sounds too good to be true, but a new site called Slicethepie helps you do exactly that.  In fact, Slicethepie doesn’t just limit you to reviews, it actually allows you to get a piece of the music industry and some of its profits, by linking music fans directly to bands. 

• Step 1: Register to be a music scout online
• Step 2: Reviewing
• Step 3: Backing the bands
• Step 4: The music exchange
• How much money can you make from backing a band?
• How much money can you make from reviewing?

Basically, if you think a band has what it takes, you can finance them and then get a share in any profits they make.  After the bands have been chosen and financially backed, the Slicethepie music exchange kicks in. This allows you to buy and trade contracts in different bands which will return depending on how many albums the band sell in the two-year period following the digital release of their album.  If you are a budding trader, you can practice on this site before you hit the big time and you’ll have a great soundtrack to accompany you.

Confused?  Here’s how it works…

Step 1: Register to be a music scout online

A music scout is basically a reviewer.  To start reviewing online, all you’ve got to do is register and you’ll receive a confirmation email with an activation code.  Follow the steps to change the password and you’ll be ready to start listening.

Step 2: Reviewing

The scouting room is where all the reviewing takes place.  The bands upload their tracks to the room and then Slicethepie selects them at random for you to listen to.  All the tracks are anonymous until you’ve reviewed them which means you can’t be picky about what you review or favour a particular band.  It’s pretty clever actually.

To carry out a review you get to listen to a track and after 60 seconds you can start writing your opinion.  After you’ve listened to the sound clip as many times as you want, you have to rate it from 1-10 and then submit your review in order to start another one.

The tricky bit is how to get the maximum amount of money out of your review. Rather than a flat rate, Slicethepie pays you depending on your star rating which in turn depends on the quality of your reviews, judged on the following criteria:

• How close your rating of the track is to the average rating the track has received from other reviewers.

• Whether your feedback is detailed and meaningful – something that will actually benefit the artist.

• How active you are as a scout – the more proper reviews you do, the higher your rating (this is not true if you aren’t taking the time to correctly review the tracks).

• Your ability to spot and ‘tip’ artists that go on to have success.

Based on our tests, your rating goes up one star for every 30 tracks you review, assuming that you listen to enough of the song and put effort into your reviews.

The money you make per review also depends on the particular scout room that you are reviewing in.  Slicethepie has more than 10,000 reviews every day and so to keep up with demand, they set the fee-per-track according to how many reviews of each track they allow.  So if there are loads of people wanting to review, the amount of reviews each track can receive is increased and each reviewer earns less.  This works out well for the bands who get more feedback, but not so well for the scouts or reviewers who get paid less.

Each scout group clearly states how much you get paid per track.  A pretty standard guide for how much Slicethepie pays out is:

• One star: 2p per review

• Two stars: 4p per review

• Three stars: 6p per review

• Four stars: 8p per review

• Five stars: 10p per review

However, the website does say that scouts can earn up to 25p per review, so look out for those higher earning scout groups and do as many reviews in them as you can in order to maximise your earnings.

As well as earning money by reviewing, you can also earn a ‘tip’ for every ten reviews you do. Tips can be used to back a band you think are really good, and if they then get through to the next stage, you get a free backstage pass for the band.  This gives you their album for free, or you can choose to buy the contracts it entitles you to in order to make money from their album sales later on.

Step 3: Backing the bands

Only the 20 highest rated artists make it into the showcase area, which is the next stage after the scout room. If you don’t fancy your chances on the music exchange then you can stick to being a scout, keep reviewing and then withdraw your money via PayPal and walk away.

However, if you are a bit more daring and think you might try your hand at a bit of market trading, Slicethepie encourages you to stick with the bands you like.  This means you help finance the recording of their album by investing in them, and then eventually take away a proportion of the profits made from their album.

This starts with the showcase where you vote for your favourite artist and if you think they are really good, pledge your financial support to them.  A band has to raise a potential £15,000 before they can pass on to the financing stage and if they do, you will have to follow through and pay the amount you have pledged in the financing stage.

To finance a band you buy a backstage pass for them for £5.  With this you get a free copy of the album, access to the band’s backstage area on Slicethepie and finally the option to buy five of the band’s contracts at 10p as opposed to the normal price of £1.50.  Each band has 3,000 backstage passes giving them the £15,000 to record their album. However, the important thing for you is the contracts as this is what enables you to make the money.

Step 4: The music exchange

After the album is released digitally, Slicethepie floats all the contracts on its music exchange for a period of two years.  The value of the contracts will rise and fall during this time depending on album sales.  It’s sort of like shares, but the contracts are in fact just bets on how many albums the band will have sold after two years and a promise from Slicethepie to give you a certain amount of money depending on those sales.

Trading contracts works like this:

• If you want to sell a contract, you enter the lowest price you are willing to sell at and if a buyer is willing to buy at that price, the sale will automatically go through.

• The same works for buying; you enter the maximum you are willing to pay for shares and if there is someone willing to sell them at that price then the system will automatically match you up and the sale will go through.

The site provides tips and news updates to help you make your trades.  All you have to do is sign up for alerts and it’ll let you know about anything that will affect share prices, like if a band gets playlisted for a major radio station or receives any good press.  At the moment there is no commission taken when you buy and sell, but the site is introducing charges of 2.5% commission from both the buyer and the seller later this year, so get trading now whilst it’s free or be very prudent with your trading so you don’t lose too much money in commission.

How much money can you make from backing a band?

At the end of the two-year period after the album is digitally released, the contracts are cashed in and you get your money.  The return depends on the amount of albums sold.  The basic return is £1 per contract for every 10,000 albums sold and 10p for every 10,000 song downloads.  This means that if the band only sells 5,000 albums you only get 50p per contract, but if the band sells 100,000 albums you get £10 per contract and so on.

This means that if you know your music and can spot bands that are doing well and are going to do even better, you can make a reasonable return from just a few hours listening to new music and then checking the exchange.  But if that sounds like too much effort, you can just stick to the review stage.

How much money can you make from reviewing?

The maximum of 25p per song means that if songs are an average of three minutes and you therefore listen to ten in half an hour, you’re looking at a £5 an hour earnings.  This doesn’t sound much, but this is a great thing to do whilst you’re doing something else, like eating or watching TV, as long as you can concentrate enough to do decent reviews.  You also don’t have to listen to the whole three minutes of the song if you really hate it, although the length of time you listen for is taken into account when Slicethepie rates you, so you should listen to as much of the track as you can bear.

Useful links

• Slicethepie
• PayPal
• Guardian article on Slicethepie