[blog] Looking at musician platforms, part 3: Music Clout and Coast 2 Coast

Published April 13th 2016

Like many other artists, I’ve been trying all kinds of websites to promote myself in an attempt to get paid for the music that I love to make. In a series of blogs, I’ll be sharing with you how I’ve experienced some of these platforms. This series will feature ReverbNation, RadioAirplay.com/Jango, Music Clout, Coast 2 Coast, MusicXray and InMusik.

The reason why I have combined Music Clout and Coast 2 Coast is because my experience with both of them has not been well. The two have nothing to do with each other though.

Coast 2 Coast Mixtapes & Music Clout

Coast 2 Coast Mixtapes & Music Clout

Music Clout

There are countless online A&R platforms around. Music Clout is one of them. They offer opportunities for artists or producers to get featured in magazines, find licensing deals, management or labels. The musician pays to submit to these opportunities.

Music Clout is the cheapest platform that I have found so far. This is the main reason why I had signed up without a monthly subscription. I would pay a little over $5 per opportunity, if I wanted to submit to anything. A great way to test the waters.

Well, I have submitted to various opportunities, paid, but never heard anything about these opportunities at all. I’ve received a confirmation of all my submissions, but that’s where it all ended too. I’ve never received any word that I’ve not been selected nor have I received any feedback to my work from A&Rs.

So, I tried to delete or deactivate my account with all my content, but that appears not to be possible at all. In short, this is not a platform I would advice to anyone to use.

On Twitter, there are various accounts of other A&R sites that all lead back to Music Clout, so have a lot of affiliate partners to promote themselves.

Coast 2 Coast Mixtapes

Coast 2 Coast appears to be a big platform. In fact, they claim to be the biggest mixtape around. Their website shows all genres, but, in my experience, all their contacts mainly seem to focus on the hip hop genre, so perhaps hip hop artists get more out of this than I sis.

I’d never heard about them, until I’d seen other artists post things about their mixtape contributions, so I decided to give it a try, when I was working with two R&B producers and, later, with my own work.

With the R&B producers, we’ve tried to get a song on an R&B mixtape. You submit for free and then you have to raise likes to be considered. The process for this was pretty straight forward, but we didn’t raise enough likes and weren’t featured on the mixtape.

Later, I submitted my video to be considered for one of their competitions. If chosen, my video would then be reviewed by industry professionals. Submitting was free and seemed to have a similar process to the mixtape, until I received an e-mail that I was considered (after 1 like already!) and had to pay $100 to continue in the competition. I stopped there.

So far, there were no real complaints from me about the platform. Everybody is allowed to try to earn money somehow. I am allowed to decline at any point, but then, I noticed that Coast 2 Coast was posting tweets to my timeline about me voting for people and tracks, that I’ve never voted for. I’ve never even heard their songs.

That sheds a different light to the interaction I thought I saw on the platform. Basically, they use everyone’s Twitter permissions to create the impression people are voting for one another and increase their own reputation as a platform. I canceled everything right away.

Funny enough, months later, the R&B track suddenly was placed on one of their mixtapes, without our permission, because our participation in the original one had ended. We had never agreed to anything else.

To me, this platform has something shady about it and I would not advice others to participate in this, but as I said, hip hop artists could experience this platform differently.

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