Click here for an update on this post and our dialogue with Taxi founder Michael Laskow.
Tuesday, we posted a rather critical review of Taxi.com, an outsourced A&R service with over 11,000 aspiring musicians who hope to realize their musical dreams by submitting their songs to various “opportunities” within the television, film, commercial and music industries. Similarly, a few weeks back we also reviewed Sonicbids.com, another service that connects artists with various promoters and opportunities.
Honesty Is the Best Policy
We were very honest in both of our reviews. My partner and I have used both services extensively, to the tune of hundreds of dollars spent on each. We ultimately recommended that people use Sonicbids but encouraged them to be careful about the promoters they submit their music to, since it costs a fee for each submission. We could not say the same for Taxi.com. Taxi seems to produce very limited results for a very small subset of artists. Further, you have no way to be careful about your submissions with Taxi. You never know who the promoter is, or frankly, whether there even is a real opportunity on the other end. That’s not to say there isn’t, just that you don’t know and cannot verify it.
How to Be Successful at Customer Service and Product Development
Within 15 minutes of our Sonicbids review we received a comment from Panos Panay, the founder of Sonicbids. He corrected a few things in our post, and he and I exchanged emails discussing their efforts to improve the items we were critical about. Then, Panos took the time to schedule a call with us, which led to a 20-30 minute discussion about Sonicbids and everything they do to help artists and promoters connect safely and with mutual benefit. Panos and I kicked around some ideas for making Sonicbids more effective, and he shared with me a lot about the company that I didn’t know. Apparently, Sonicbids invests a lot of money with some of their biggest promoters in order to guarantee spots to Sonicbids artists, earning those artists better than average payment terms, and much more. Additionally, they have some great ideas for continuing to improve the service that I am very excited about. Panos is a little shy about tooting his own horn, so let me do that for him now. It seems like a great company with a lot of dedication toward making the service ideal for their users and Panos is very committed to that.
How to Fail at Customer Service and Product Development
Taxi, on the other hand, did not respond whatsoever to our review, further enforcing the opinion that they really don’t care about making the service more effective, and perhaps don’t have any ideas about addressing the very legitimate concerns that artists have about their service. They’d rather ignore them and go about providing a fairly poor service. Although, it might be reasonable to assume that they didn’t know such a review had been published. Not everybody is as connected with their community as Sonicbids. So, we decided to post a link to our review in the Taxi forums and open a dialog about our complaints.
Ignore It and It Will Go Away
Unfortunately, Taxi did not choose to address those concerns. They decided to ban us from the forums. They said we were “Advertising” in the forums because we linked to our blog. It’s a little late to find out if they would have done the same if we had posted the review in the forums themselves, without the link. But, you would think that a company interested in addressing our concerns would have deleted the post with the link, and told us to re-post our complaint without it. They didn’t.
Maybe by Taxi They Meant Endlessly Circling The Parking Lot
It’s sad, really. Taxi does not sell a quality product. They sell a dream. Join Taxi, where this small handful of people have gotten strong results over a long company history, and you too might see your musical aspirations realized. However, they don’t stop people whose music will never meet their minimum requirements for submission to an opportunity from signing up and paying $200-300 for a year’s worth of opportunity listings. They gladly take money from people who they know will not benefit from their service. And, when good artists who are otherwise achieving commercial success with their music question why the same hasn’t happened through Taxi, they don’t address these very legitimate concerns – they ban you, ignore you, and hope that nobody noticed.
Listen to Your Customers
As the owners of a new company focused on helping artists, you can bet that my partner and I will be taking a page out of the Sonicbids play book. We want a great service. We want one that many thousands of artists will use, not just because we profit from it, but because it works and truly helps them. Part of achieving that goal is listening to your customers and working with them to make your service valuable – like Panos does.
So, Kudos to Panos Panay and Sonicbids.
Shame on Taxi. Buyers beware.
Joey Flores
CEO, earbits.com
joey@earbits.com
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/joeyjflores
Twitter: @earbits
A couple years ago I received a Taxi newsletter, which included a lot of personal information about the owner’s financial woes and the hardship he was facing as his friend was in dangerous stages of a bout with cancer. It concluded with a request to send him some money. It might have been a sincere effort to do good, but it made me feel weird about the service.
Yeah…I guess you will do anything when you have a friend in need, but it seems a strange outlet for asking for a favor.
My friends and I were involved with Taxi for years AND we went to the LA “Road Rally”. We are both professional musicians that have done quality work for over 15 years and found their services biased and useless. While I understand that the Music world is strange at best, the amount of money TAXI demands verses the amount of money the referrals and the pay for annual fees AND each track you submit are insane. If you do not believe that thy are mostly a scam, at the road rally I was at they said, and I quote, “Stevie Wonder called and wanted to speak but we turned him down because we were already full.”No joke. No lie. That is what the head man in charge said.
Please find other ways to get your music out there for less money.
Please do not use Taxi. I went to their FREE LA Road Rally and it was a disgusting display of thousands of people slamming into each other like desperate pigs to a trough. They even said, and I quote, “Stevie Wonder called and wanted to speak to all of you but we turned him down because our schedule was full.” My friends and I have done professional quality music for over 15 years and their service, which we used for years, was totally useless and a waste of our hard earned money.
Please find other ways of spending your hard earned money and precious time on other resources.