Slice the pie, legit or a scam?

What is Slice the pie? It is a website that was created back in 2007 to give aspiring musicians a chance to have their music rated and reviewed. This can lead them on rasing funds for creating their first musical album. The fans (or scouts as they are referred to on the site)get to write reviews and rate their music.. which enables them to earn money themselves.

How does it work?

Each artist submits three tracks and these are submitted to the various Scout Rooms depending on the type of music. The Scouts are randomly given tracks which they don’t know who the artist name is nor the name of the track. Once they have reviewed that piece of music the name of the track and the artist is revealed. This would seem to make the system of reviewing fairer because you can’t just vote on recommendations from your friends. Each music track has to have thirty separate reviews before their artist rating can be assessed. Only the top rated artists from each genre will be moved into the Showcase.

How does the process of reviewing music work?

When signing up, you’re asked to rate different genres of music on a “Love to Hate” scale, so in theory they play more of that music for you. However I find they will push all sorts of music your way, so be prepared to rate a variety of tunes. If you really don’t feel comfortable rating a song, you can always skip it. Here’s how it works – you’re given the task of listening to a song, writing a review, and then ranking it on a 1 to 10 scale. You have to wait 90 seconds after the song starts playing to submit the review, but you can take as long as you want to actually write it out.

A look at the basic screen

You have to be thoughtful and varied with your reviews – they won’t let you say the same thing over and over again in a copy/paste fashion. Even if you write out similiar reviews, you’ll find that after a few you’ll get stuck with a warning saying “that review looks familiar! try writing something original!” You’re given an “energy” bar that starts out with 10 energy points. Each review you submit costs you 1 energy, but you regain a new energy every 3 minutes. I suppose this is to prevent people from submitting reviews too fast, but I find it replenishes to 10 rather quickly and never got anywhere near 0! (but maybe I am just slow..)

How much do i get paid by review?

Everyone starts off with a base salary of 2 cents per review, but if you submit lots of helpful reviews you can work your way up to a base salary of 4 cents. That sounds ridiculously low, but that is just the base rate – the more detailed, helpful and high quality review you can provide them, the more you will be paid. I never was only paid just 2 cents – here I reviewed probably about 10 songs and got paid around 15 cents per review. I did take my time and tried to write something helpful and constructive for each song.g

Slice the pie proof of payment

Note: Once you cash out, your reviews are sent to be reviewed by an actual human and can take up to 5 days to transfer to your Paypal account. I would make sure you’re not writing anything inappropriate or cruel because you may risk them rejecting your reviews and not paying you for all the hard work you did

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My final opinion

Overall this site is awesome and completely LEGITIMATE and it can be a really enjoyable activity. What’s important to remember here is that this site is for people who appreciate music and are interesting in helping out new bands – not just those looking for a paycheck! Sure, the extra money is cool, and it can be a really fun hobby for music lovers willing to help out bands with some constructive critisicm. However it’s very time consuming and it’s a lot more in depth than just listening to music. You can’t expect to turn on the music, let it play in the background while you play around on Facebook/Youtube … You really need to dedicate yourself to the song and write the review as you listen to make it helpful and worthwile. You also need a fairly good grasp of music and the vocabulary involved – so if you don’t really know any technical aspects of music, you can do some research to write better reviews.

If you found this post helpful or have any further questions, feel free to leave a comment in the section below!

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