I was just working on a new brochure yesterday, and spent some time on this issue. People always ask what our success rate is... tough to answer, but this is what I wrote.
Q: What is TAXI’s “Success Rate?”
A: For years we advertised that our success rate was 6%. We were being incredibly conservative because we wanted to make sure we were being absolutely truthful. We based that number only on what we could verify.
The truth is that most of our members who get deals and placements don’t take the time let us know! And because TAXI doesn’t take a percentage or participate financially in the deals our members make, we don’t see the cue sheets from placements. We also don’t see our members’ statements from their Performing Rights Organizations showing the income they make from TAXI-related connections.
Another thing we didn’t consider when we advertised that 6% of our members get deals is that many of our members make connections with companies that ask the members if they have more material after they initially “meet” them through TAXI. It’s extremely common that a deal for just one song or instrumental track turns into subsequent deals for dozens more songs or tracks with that same company! We’ve never counted those in our “Success Rate.” If we had, the number would be dramatically higher!
Considering that thousands of deals have been made for a virtually unknowable number of songs and instrumentals since 1992, we have no way to accurately track the countless deals and placements that have come through TAXI connections. We feel very confident that the success rate we’ve advertised over the last two decades may be extremely understated. But we’ve always wanted to err on the side of being conservative.
***********************************
While researching this issue, I went through every thread starting (1st) post in the success stories section of the TAXI forum during a 3 year period. I copied and pasted just the first post in a 12 point font into a word doc. When I was done pasting them all in there, the doc was 156 pages long, and took me 23 hours of time to build.
I didn't count deals that came from songs/tracks written for a TAXI listing that found a home later. I only counted deals from forwards and Rally connections. And the number of members who post on the forum is a tiny slice of overall membership, so it's just a sample of s subset.
In the end, there was no way to come up with an accurate number or % because of the multi-deal factor, the deals over time with the same company factor, the deals that become placements over time factor, etc. Richard's Rally meeting that turned into more than 100 tracks being signed by one company is a great example. How many more songs or tracks will he sign to that company over the next 10 years? How many placements will result from his music being in that catalog over the next ten years? And those would all be directly attributable to his meeting a library owner at the Rally. The same thing happens all the time from just a single forward.
What we don't try to count are scenarios like this: A member gets a deal through a forward. That member introduces 5 or 10 other members to the library owner he/she now has a relationship with (over time), and some of them get deals. Some of those members also introduce their friends from the Rally and the Forum to the library owners. If you were to take JUST 25 members who are active on the forum and the Rally, then count all the deals and placements that happen for them through direct submissions and Rally connections, and then add in their friends (likely made here on the Forum or at the Rally) and the deals and placements they have over the next tens years, the number would probably be huge.
The reason I was looking into it was because I saw the owner of a copycat company state that his company's success rate was probably twice that of TAXI's. We found that odd considering there are currently about a dozen "listings" on his site that have been copied and pasted from the TAXI site
Clearly they don't vet the companies they work with or the authenticity of the listings those companies post on their site. And deals can't happen because of those listings as there's nobody who needs the music on the receiving end because they don't know where our REAL listings came from.
Now you know how I spend my weekends!
Sad, isn't it? I really need to get a life!
Michael