By Michael Laskow
(This is reprinted from an answer to a question posed by many of TAXI's Web site viewers.)
People always ask me what TAXI's "success ratio" is. Here are some numbers for you:
Typically, about 6% of our members will get a deal of one kind or another during the course of their membership year. The deals range from single-song publishing deals, to multi-song publishing deals, to staff writer deals, film and TV placements, and of course, our members have had major record label deals and songs cut by major artists through TAXI.
About 40% of our members will have at least one submission forwarded during their membership year. Obviously, the better the music, the more often people are forwarded. Some members get forwarded more often than not. Others, who still need to develop more, don't get forwarded as often.
Overall, about 11% of all submissions get forwarded, but this number can be misleading, so I'd like to clarify it a bit. Each TAXI listing has a "bar." No, not the kind you go to for a drink. It's more like pole vaulting.
If the listing was run by a Senior V.P. of A&R at a major label, and they're looking for material for a top ten act, then the bar will be placed higher than if the request was for music for an industrial video.
In other words, when the bar is high, we're really picky about what we forward. We have to be careful not to burn any bridges with the companies that give our members opportunities. If we don't hold ourselves to high standards, their trust in our ears goes out the window.
A little afterthought: A few years ago, I got a call from a publisher who thanked us for sending him so many great writers. He signed deals with seven TAXI members in one fell swoop. When we checked our database to see how many of those writers let us know that they signed deals as a result of being TAXI members, only one had delivered the good news to us.
At that time, we knew of over 500 deals done by our members. After the phone call from the publisher, I calculated that maybe as many as 3,500 deals had been done, but only a fraction of the members who signed the deals informed us. It's a weird phenomenon -- people work for years to get a deal, and when they finally get one, they forget to tell the people that hooked them up. Go figure!
People often ask, "How many submissions do you get for a typical listing?" The answer is that it's a wide range. Sometimes we get as few as 20 or 30 submissions. Other times (for the superstar listings) we may get a few hundred. It's important to remember that we don't have a quota system. We send everything that's great and on target.
I hope I've answered all your questions. Thanks for asking them.