Iconoculture: For anyone who has ever said, "If I had a dollar for every time I turned a friend on to a new band … " — well, now you can cash in, thanks to Surrge.
Publicly launched at this year's South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, Surrge is an iTunes for populists, empowering its listeners, dubbed “scouts,” to act as amateur A&R teams for the online music store. Beyond the usual rewards for exposing undiscovered bands to the masses, Surrge ups the ante by throwing in cold hard cash.
Fans referring bands listed on Surrge to other fans get a percentage of sales on any referrals, and “scouts” who sign up new artists to Surrge get 1% of all future sales from the artist on the site.
In a rapidly evolving music industry where individually powered blogs can wield more consumer tastemaking power than major record labels, old-school concepts like A&R are competing with more egalitarian models. How long before a rash of other user-driven content sites start cashing in on this model?
Show me the money: Surrge incentivizes music fandom [Iconoculture]
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