To that end, I spoke at length with David Bell about his experience using uPlaya. Bell (a.k.a. Slimdog) is the founder of Slimdog Productions and part of the hip-hop group The Block Scholars. He has become something of an artist advocate for uPlaya and the Hit Song Science technology. The Block Scholars, consisting of Bell and lyricist NoBull (Bennett Baskerville), have used uPlaya to further their burgeoning success as independent hip-hop artists.
RS: As you must know, there are so many new services that have been rolled out recently, geared toward helping artists promote their music. And everything is changing rapidly in the music industry, so there's a lot of new entrepreneurial digital services and web sites taking off. With all that out there, what is it that drew you to uPlaya in particular?
The fact that the technology breaks down your song, and that they compare your music to the last 50 years of hits. It's kind of a good gauge on how your songs may compare to other songs that have been great hits in the past.
It's also kind of fun. You know, after you're done doing your song, it's kind of fun to go in and stick it through their hit song science technology and see if you got a good score or not. Just like last night, we're working on an album for this winter, and we had just completed a few songs, so I went in last night just to see how the songs are. Of course we think all our songs are good, but just for comparison's sake you stick it in there and we happened to get a 79, which is a platinum [Auddy] on one of our songs. It's kind of fun to sit there and watch the HSS work, and you know see a score pop up. Sometimes it might not be good, I've had that happen too, but it's still fun.
That's exactly what it is. And like I said, you can kind of take the results and run with them, or you can just turn around and say, “Hey, whatever."
Did you have specific goals when you put your music onto uPlaya? Did you think, “I wanna see how these Block Scholars songs stack up against other hip-hop songs," or “What's their hit potential?" You've mentioned that you kind of used it to tweak your songs in certain ways. Was that something that you anticipated doing from the start or did that kind of develop along the way?
It kind of developed along the way. At first I was like, “Let me see if what they are saying is true." We have gotten accolades for our music even before I went to uPlaya. We were on many web sites; a Garage Band song of the day, one web site gave us hip-hop song of the year. So I went and took those songs and said, “These places already think the songs are good, let's see how uPlaya judges them." And the songs that got the awards got platinums and golds, so it kind of validates [the initial praise]. And then what I did was start experimenting with music, putting in demos that we just finished. [If they] didn't get a good score, turn around, tweak it, add some more instruments, make the music clearer, a better bitrate, and put it through again, and up went the scores. Just little things like that make a lot of difference.
You know, I've put some 150-200 songs through, so I've invested a lot of money and a lot of music into uPlaya and you have to if you really want to see what it's gonna do. You're gonna have to go yourself and try it out. And I went and used the widgets and got great response on the widgets. They have a press kit. You gotta go use the press kit. I have a press kit with another site, you know, and I sit there and compare the press kits and see how many hits I get off of it. Are people looking at uPlaya's kit as well as this other kit? Am I getting any feedback from anybody because of uPlaya, am I getting any feedback because of the other one? I do compare, on a daily basis, uPlaya to the other places that I'm at, and they've been great. It's gotten us a lot of exposure as independent artists.
So it sounds like your experience using uPlaya has played a role in shaping your career or how you promote yourself as an artist, the business side of things. Would you say it's played a role in what you're doing creatively? Do you feel like you're still taking the same creative approach that you did prior to using uPlaya?
I'm taking the same creative approach. Honestly, I'm not making songs to try and get hit songs on uPlaya. I'm making songs for me. Like I said, we've got a lot of songs that didn't get great scores, but we're still pushing those songs, as well as the ones that have gotten awards. I'm not gonna turn around and change what we do in order to get good uPlaya scores. Like I said, we were getting accolades and awards and stuff like that in magazines before we went to uPlaya. uPlaya is just one validation tool. It's a validation. It helps validate what we already know about our music. Now it's just a matter of getting it to the next level.
And the thing that really attracted me to uPlaya was to find out that some major labels are already using it. And places like Harvard had done extensive research and reports on it. I don't know how many artists do, but I really looked to find out what uPlaya was about before trying it out and investing my money. Because a lot of us independent artists don't have the money to do that. So I really went and looked for research from credible sources before I turned around and invested my money in it. Hopefully in the future all this investment stuff will pay off. It's starting to a little bit. I feel with a little more promotion and maybe with some more help from uPlaya we can get our music to the next level and hopefully get it heard by somebody.
Stay tuned for part two later this week.
