How many screeners?

[daveydad]

Not sure if this is the right place for this but I'm curious how many screeners there are and do they each "specialize" in a certain genre?
I often wonder if it might be beneficial if at least 2 screeners critique a song. Thoughts?

[davewalton]

Not sure if this is the right place for this but I'm curious how many screeners there are and do they each "specialize" in a certain genre?
I often wonder if it might be beneficial if at least 2 screeners critique a song. Thoughts?

Don't know how up-to-date this is but here's Taxi's page on screeners...

http://www.taxi.com/aandr.html

There are definitely "Country" screeners and "Electronica" screeners, etc. You won't have a specialist in Children's music doing screening for a listing ala Cannibal Corpse. Obviously some genres kind of bleed over one into the other. They're not going to have separate screeners for Punk vs Grunge for example.

In your scenario they'd have to really have three screeners per track... in case of a tie by two of them. In reality though, it would be really impossible for each song to go through two (or more) screenings. Plus you're assuming that more tracks would get through on multiple screenings but that wouldn't be true. The listing companies only want cream of the crop music, not more music. Relaxing the standards to let more music through would be kind of a false approval for the composers and wouldn't give the listing companies what they're really wanting.

A few years back another forum member (no longer around for whatever reason) and I had a chance to spend a couple of days at the Taxi offices so see first hand what we all wonder about. As part of that little extravaganza, I got to listen to a lot of music that was being submitted for these listings. A lot of the music submitted just wasn't targeted well at all. Most of the music I listened to was way off target (like for a "Chill/Ambient Electronica" listing somebody submitted a track called "Four On The Floor" which was as far away from chill/ambient as anything could be). That was the main problem... bad targeting. The mext big issue was sound quality, bad recording, keyboards sounding like a Walmart Casio keyboard from the 80's, etc. So for those tracks to have to go through two or three screenings when in the first five seconds it was obvious that it was a lost cause, well... it would be a half-year before we got any results on any listing. Oh... and to double or triple the cost of screening, Taxi would either go out of business or our membership fees would skyrocket to make up the difference.

Hope that helps!

[daveydad]

thanks! great info!

[Russell Landwehr]

One interesting clue to this is in the "screener shoutout" part of the forum.

If you just scan the screener numbers in the titles, and keep going back in time, you will see the activity of the screener numbers changing in an interesting way.

Russell

BTW, I wonder if screener #1 is ML