UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2019: SoundBetter has been acquired by Spotify. We will wait to see what changes to the platform this brings, and those changes will be reported here. Since last year, SoundBetter results in dramatically lower numbers of inquiries from clients, presumably because the provider market is over saturated. You almost never get inquiries and must almost exclusively buy credits and submit to jobs in order to be hired on the platform now. And even when you try to bid on jobs, most have already reached the “maximum number of bids allowed” per job. In my test, 7 out of 15 on the first page were already at capacity. This platform has huge potential but certainly needs some tweaks in terms of infrastructure. Just thought I would update my readers on my experience as of late. If anything changes I’ll let you know. Full review below.

Have you ever had a really great idea?

Well, I can say with relative certainty that if you’re a professional provider of music services, such as mixing, mastering, etc, every single one of us had the dream that was to become SoundBetter.com – only one problem. No one could built it.

Then SoundBetter.com came around, and they did.

Some time in 2014, I stumbled across a website that professed to be the answer to the problem of any musician who is looking for audio engineers, but may not live in a city big enough to have good, quality mixing. It also naturally provided a solution for the providers of say services to connect with would-be musician, rappers, singers, and the like. The website was SoundBetter.com – a “marketplace for musicians to find and hire Recording Studios, Mixing Engineers, Mastering Engineers and professional Session Musicians.”

I was a bit skeptical but thought, “Hey, what’ve I got to lose? It costs nothing. I’ll give it a shot.” I posted my resume on the site with a short bio and samples of my mixes and thought if anything, this could be fun or cool and I might get a client or two. Before long, I actually had a good number of clients contact me explaining that they loved how my mixes sounded and that they wanted to hire me to mix their music. Awesome!

How Does It Work?

The site basically allows musicians, singers, rappers, and pretty much anyone who wants to find someone to hire musically, to post a job on their job board, dubbed the “Premium Job Board,” and then invite mixers that they think would be a good fit for the project to bid on it, kind of like Freelancer.com. Engineers can also browse jobs and submit to them using credits which you can purchase, (again like Freelancer,) but I rarely, if ever, do this, and I imagine other professional mix engineers don’t do this either. More on that in a moment.

SoundBetter.com was founded by Shachar Gilad, the site’s CEO. Which kind of makes sense how such an awesome site came to fruition, because Shachar was actually behind marketing projects for both Waves and Apple before he launched SoundBetter. No surprise then, that he could recognize the need and then act on it and create a 500 Startups company.

Top Quality Professionals At Competitive Rates?

The first question you might be asking yourself about SoundBetter is – what’s the quality like? Well that depends.

They have two tiers of providers: standard and premium. The first tier is for anyone who lists themselves as a music industry professional. The second tier is a program that you must apply and be approved for – the Premium Program. Premium costs proividers $59 per month, if accepted. The first thing I can tell you right away about SoundBetter.com is that when they say that they actually manually vet their Premium providers’ applications, they actually mean it. I got a phone call and was questioned about my experience in the industry, and my credentials. Professional ‘Premium’ providers must be vetted to be approved.

What type of musicians, producers, and singers can you actually find on the site? Right on the front page you can find your answer:

• Kanye West’s Producer
• Hoobastank’s Drummer
• Jamiroquai’s Guitarist
• Beyonce’s Songwriter
• Joe Cocker’s Bass Player
• Morrissey’s Guitarist

Just to name a few.

There are countless others like myself, who have worked with multiple Grammy-award winning artists, on major motion pictures etc, as well. In my case, I have the rare privilege of also being a major-label signed recording artist, so I’m able to provide not only mixing, mastering, and production services to clients, but also vocal services, with almost 2 decades of experience. So I’d say the level of quality you can get is as high as you’d expect to find, short of going to an RIAA event.

Everything That Glitters Isn’t Gold

As mentioned, not every provider on SoundBetter is a Premium Provider, so if you’re a musician looking to hire a professional, you do have to deal with the fact that there is both quality and quantity, which overall is probably a good thing. You also have to deal with the fact that when you post something to the job board, even if you invite someone to a job posting, that posting still stays on the job board – which is available to all providers – who can swoop down on the listing and try to take the invitee’s business. This too, is probably overall not a good thing. Imagine every time you swiped right on Tinder, people became alerted to the fact that you’;ve swiped recently, and sent you messages. That’s kind of what it’s like. Lol.

(More options for you, I suppose? Depends on how you look at it!)

If you’re a provider, then you have to understand that, as mentioned, most jobs on the job board have been sent to people that the poster intended for the job. So your essentially scouring through lots of “leftovers,” if you will, but not always. Another downside is that, as I mentioned in the update in the beginning, most of the jobs have reached capacity by the time you get to them. In my test, 7 out of 15 were full and not able to receive any more submissions. At this rate, you’d pretty much have to be on SoundBetter a LOT in order to use all your credits. (You get 15 credits per month, as Premium provider.) I’ve actually got over 400 credits!

The truth is, when you’re a busy professional and you’ve got clients coming to you, it’s hard to justify the time (and credits) required to “bid” on jobs. Not only that, but any professional mixer is going to have rates that are going to get SO low-balled by non-professional mixers, that sometimes you rarely get the job anyway, because some guy with a laptop and an untreated room is going to outbid you and say he’ll mix the project for 30 bucks – (that Tinder thing I talked about earlier).

Another thing worth mentioning is that you get lowered down in the search results for not responding quickly. I think this is a mistake. I don’t know about you, but I have a life outside of work, also known as weekends and holidays. That means I don’t respond to SoundBetter inquiries on weekends or holidays, just like all my other work email. But SoundBetter will actually punish you for this. You’ll be lowered down for waiting days to respond, regardless of reason, as can be seen here in the photo below.

The reason why they tried to include this feature in the first place is because in general, user experience (UX) is strongly correlated with customer satisfaction. So they want to keep users happy. In order to do this, their algorithm is checking for response rate, assume (AI) that this somehow ties in to the quality of the user experiences on the platform.

This is a trigger in AI systems for determining the value of content – determining whether or not content should be shown. For instance, Google does this with their search algorithm. The more suited toward user experience a search response is, the better it will rank. There is a key difference though, and this is the part that SoundBetter wrong, I feel. Their service is dynamic – it is not static, like content. Just imagine; only restaurants who served people 24 hours show up first. If people pull up to order while closed — even if this is normal — your rank is lowered. This is why it makes no sense.

In general though, faster response times are good for sales. If a lead is generated, the faster you respond to the lead, the more likely you will close a sale. But they have left out a key factor of this as well: In sales, that process is usually automated, meaning, those instant responses are automatically generated on your behalf – you don’t actually write them. No one would be expected to manually respond to sales inquiries or leads in real time manually, 24/7 the way SoundBetter does, not even at a high end firm. This is an oversight on their part.

Further proof of this is Facebook. On business pages, they include “Response Times.” But Facebook, being a billion dollar company, has thought ahead and allows people to build bots that automatically respond to messages on your behalf, immediately, thus keeping response time high.

Another thing for which you will get lowered in rank, as you can see in the photo, is not responding to job inquiries even when the inquiries make no sense.

For example, if a job says, “How much do you charge for beats?” you’re required to respond and include a dollar amount on that job, or you’ll lose your rating. Even if it doesn’t describe what actually needs to be done. I’ve gotten some of the most absurd job requests that didn’t warrant a response because it was impossible to attribute a price to them. It would be like a dating site that required women to respond to every indecent proposal she got or risk losing her profile visibility.

Like…really?

Once I caught on to the fact that ignoring ridiculous requests was causing me to lose my ranking, I started answering them by putting the lowest allowable response price – $20.

So What’s The Verdict? Is It Worth It?

SoundBetter.com is something that was needed in the industry for a long, long time. This is something that I have shared with Shachar in my excitement about finding the site. Before the site was launched, there wasn’t really a way for musicians to connect with audio professionals to get top flight mixes done. It’s kind of like MusicXray.com, except MusicXray is for musicians looking to connect with executives, and people on the administrative end, managers etc, whereas soundbetter allows you to connect with audio professionals on the creative end.

Are you going to make money with this as a Premium provider? Is it worth the investment? If you’re willing to take your job seriously and prospect for clients, then the answer is YES. But it is going to take an investment of time on a regular basis, since most jobs over a certain time frame are already at capacity. Logging in every day is probably a good idea here. But if you do it, it can be lucrative.

As I mentioned, the provider market is somewhat saturated to I get far fewer inquiries now. I had pretty much already made that figured within 2-3 years of being on the platform, and that’s without applying for jobs.

On September 12, 2019, SoundBetter was actually acquired by Spotify. This actually makes a lot of sense for Spotify, because they now allow their users to directly upload their material to the platform. What they hope to accomplish with this acquisition is a marketplace where artists can get everything they need in order to confidently and consistently upload music to the platform. More users on the platform, as we have seen from Facebook, means more advertising revenue, and more advertising revenue naturally means more profits.

But whether you use Spotify or not, if you’re someone who realizes you might benefit from collaborating with other professional level musicians, producers, engineers, etc, I highly suggest you give the site a try. It’s free to sign up and browse, and you will undoubtedly find someone there who can help bring your musical ideas to fruition.

And now I pass the mic to you. Have you used SoundBetter.com? I’d love to hear your experiences!