Geoff Duncan

GarageBand.com does something which combines viral marketing with ego-stroking the site's independent artists: they give out "Track of the Day" and "Track of the Week" awards. The songs get a day/week of more-prominent placement on the GarageBand site—I'm not sure that conveys any tangible benefit to the artists—but, perhaps more significantly, artists tend to promote these awards to their friends, fans, and listeners, thereby pimping GarageBand.com to folks who might not otherwise visit the site. Clever!

And it seems to work: the text you're reading now represents one of an apparently vast number of blog entries, site updates, news flashes, and other online postings from GarageBand.com artists promoting, noting, or commenting on having been awarded Track of the Day status. A bunch of these postings are copy-and-pasted from the notices GarageBand.com itself sends out—suggesting musicianship and writing ability don't correlate!—but Spencer Critchley's notes about country artist Bo Billy are a good read.

GarageBand.com chart rankings are determined by the reviews of individual tracks done by GarageBand.com users. Track of the Day awards are given to the highest-ranked track in a genre which hasn't yet won the award; I don't know offhand how Track of the Week is determined. GarageBand.com also awards twenty-three separate Reviewers' Picks for things like Best Guitars, Smoochiest Love Song, and... well, Stupidest Song I've Ever Heard, on a genre-by-genre basis.

All this is by way of mentioning "Glide Path" (also available over on the Tunes page) will be the Instrumental Rock Track of the Day for April 25, 2005 on GarageBand.com. Right now, it's charting at #28 out of 191 self-classified instrumental rock tracks actively being reviewed by GarageBand members, and #121 out of a total 914 instrumental rock tracks on the site. Those rankings are undoubtedly going to change because, as of this moment, Glide Path has only been reviewed by eight or nine listeners: not even enough to generate a star rating!

This isn't the first time I've parked in this particular garage: about a year and a half ago, "Only After the Sky" received a Track of the Day award in GarageBand.com's (comparatively small) Jazz category. I entered "Glide Path" into GarageBand.com's review process (along with "Hard Times," available over on the Tunes page) because the site has recently rolled out a number of changes—like abandoning RealPlayer for audio playback (yay!)—and I was curious what the review experience was like for artists now. The site expanded its genre system from a dozen-or-so core genres to an organically-evolving list of more then fifty, many of which point to larger parent genres. The new system is not without its confusions (tell me the difference between Electronic and Electronica?) but enables things like Instrumental Rock to be a subset of Rock. Not earth-shattering, I know, but certainly welcome to both listeners and artists. They've also rolled out ways to regulate their review process, which was not-infrequently abused by some site users, whether for kicks or just to rapidly achieve the number of completed reviews necessary for a free upload credit. Artists get to rate the quality of the written reviews they receive; reviewers can appeal what they believe to be unduly negative evaluations of their writing to the Hall of Justice, which is staffed by some of the site's most highly-rated reviewers. (At the moment, I'm well-enough regarded as a review that I qualify for "jury duty"—whoo-hoo!)

I haven't come to any firm conclusions yet, but overall, I'd say GarageBand's changes are largely successful in principle: they're aimed at building community, providing genuine feedback for artists, and supporting the site's purpose of identifying and promoting "the best" independent music on the Internet. (And a recent deals with MSN Music and Live365 mean that being "identified" could conceivably have tangible benefits for an artist here and there.) Nonetheless, the system is still so new—and so in flux— that I'm not ready to speculate about the viability of GarageBand.com's community and business model in the medium-to-long term, or what artists and listeners gain.

But, hey—I got a Track of the Day award. Pretty cool, huh?