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Just curious how everyone feels about the accuracy of supplied reference cues on listings?
Is the listing actually seeking similar tunes or is there leeway? Just curious of your thoughts.

You have to read the text of the listing. They will often say use these a la's as inspiration for something similar, other times they say they want something just like the a la's but you can't copy anything about the a la's. You could always post up whatever you have in peer to peer, a link to your song and provide the text of the listing, and we'll give you our thoughts as to whether it might be a fit.

This is one of the toughest things to learn as a Taxi member: how to interpret listings and a la's. Sometimes the a la's seem to have not much to do with the description, but most often they are pretty solid. For the times when the a la's are different from one another within a single listing, the goal is to find out what the three of them share and then aim for that characteristic. Is it energy, or instrumentation... featured instrument or groove? Sometimes, the customer provides references to Taxi that end up being nothing like the track they end up choosing. I think Michael said it well during the most recent Taxi TV episode (paraphrase): "Sometimes supervisors don't have the musical vocabulary to accurately describe what they want, they just know what they want."

Listing #Y180501MI asks for "Medieval" cues but gives a John Dowland song as a reference--but he was a Renaissance composer.

For interpreting listings, this was an excellent Taxi TV episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAS0395q_PQ

I agree sometimes the references are confusing. We have to consider the listing as a whole and all references, and how they all relate (common elements between references, etc).

You can also contact Taxi and they might be able to help clear up the question.

For some of the listings, they are all over the place. I don’t see how anyone could land a forward except through sheer luck with some of them.

To me, it is best to make a bunch of songs in whatever style is requested and pick the best one or two to send in.

I feel that even a copycat version of some of the songs would get rejected. I wouldn’t read too much into these things. Just work on making a bunch of music, and submit a few that you feel are the best.

All of the songs that you don’t submit or that get rejected should be shopped elsewhere. Nothing goes to waste. Use the listings as fuel and motivation to create, but don’t wait for that forward to get stuff signed.

Many rejected songs can go on to collect serious coin.