Let me throw this out there and see what other people think about this. I am not sure if people involved in this are on this board or what. I am going to try to just present the facts and get some opinions:


I was solicited to be a compilation that is included with a regularly published magazine.

My band paid $300 to be included.

We were never notified of its completion and the magazines publishing. And never received a copy of the disc or the mag.

We contact them looking for a few copies - they give us the runaround.

A band member orders the latest issue from Amazon, all receipts say its the latest issue, he gets an issue two years old.

Said band member contacts them again - runaround, now with attitude. We are trying to be nice.

We find out the comp is a 2-disc CD with 47 bands.
Lets do the math:
47x$300 = $14,100

We paid $300 to get lost in this mess. I hope someone hears and likes our song.


How am I supposed to feel about this?

you're supposed to feel pissed off and somewhat violent. the least you deserve is your 300balloons back and the least these fucks deserve is a crack in the throat. go get em or they'll do it to some other band.

Don't ever pay money to be on a compilation. I get solicitations via e-mail all the time for scams like this. If I wanted to pay to be on something, I'd just put it out myself.

The kind of exposure you'd get on one of these things probably wouldn't get you anywhere, anyway.

Folks who put out compilations should let you submit for free and then give you some copies of your own...

It's a crazy world out there.

I would see if you could contact some of the other bands on the comp and sort of rally them together to try to get some satisfaction - whether monetary or product - because there is strength in numbers.

I am sorry this happened to you.

What's the magazine?

vockins wrote:What's the magazine?

Maybe I will post the mag name later, but I am curious to get untainted opinions first.

Let's just say many on this board are familiar with this mag and some have even been interviewed in it as well.

How did they solicit you?

Is it a big-name magazine? Or at least one that we all know about and read?

If so, how could it be 2 years since they put out an issue? If not, why would you give them money to be on their comp?

What it all comes down to is how many copies of the magazine do they sell? If you think about it, if they sell 500,000 copies of each print of the mag, and then they give away this 2-disc comp with every copy, then they sure aren't making anything off this comp.

Figure that your $300 is supposed to pay for artwork, duplication, all the overhead of their business that's associated with this comp... if there are 47 bands and they only sell 47,000 copies of the magazine (with the record included) then it seems like in a sense, you paid $300 toward 1,000 copies of the comp (each band did this). That doesn't seem unreasonable, if paying to be on a comp is the kinda thing you wanna do.

What I'm saying is, without knowing the number of copies of this magazine that they're gonna sell, these numbers are all meaningless. Except for you having paid money.

My angle is, anytime somebody I don't know or implicitly trust asks me for money so they can do something for me, I'm probably gonna say no. Unless it's a big-name magazine. Like, if it was SPIN or something (yeah, ugh) it might be worth $300 to have a gazillion people listen to your song.

Sorry to hear that the prognosis here is negative. Can it still turn out to be a cool thing?

KeithV wrote:Don't ever pay money to be on a compilation.

Damn straight. It's just pay to play in another format. If the record label or whatever actually needs your money to manufacture and promote the CD, then what good are they? How established can they possibly be, and by extention, who the hell is likely to give it a listen?

And if Emergenza ever contacts you, tell them to piss off too.

joesepi wrote:Let me throw this out there and see what other people think about this. I am not sure if people involved in this are on this board or what. I am going to try to just present the facts and get some opinions:


I was solicited to be a compilation that is included with a regularly published magazine.

My band paid $300 to be included.

We were never notified of its completion and the magazines publishing. And never received a copy of the disc or the mag.

We contact them looking for a few copies - they give us the runaround.

A band member orders the latest issue from Amazon, all receipts say its the latest issue, he gets an issue two years old.

Said band member contacts them again - runaround, now with attitude. We are trying to be nice.

We find out the comp is a 2-disc CD with 47 bands.
Lets do the math:
47x$300 = $14,100

We paid $300 to get lost in this mess. I hope someone hears and likes our song.


How am I supposed to feel about this?

We still do not have an actual sample of the product.

This was a "reputable" semi-annual periodical that I've/we've read with some regularity.

Having seen previous month's compilations, we thought - ok, why not.

Perhaps we allowed ourselves to get taken. Sure. It's easy to go there in hindsight. But this wasn't just some random thing, either, which was part of the allure.


Hey! They actually used us to stamp out money for their coffers!

As that's not too far off from their name, I guess we could have seen it coming....just my own two cents x 150K.

joe - i know what mag you're talking about, and you're not the first person i've heard similar stories from (and had my own experiences) re: this mag/guy. i turned down a smililar opportunity a while back cuz it didn't make sense. that mag is very well intentioned and run by a totally well intentioned dude who's spread a little too thin and some details definitely get lost in the cracks. i bet 80% of the people here own copies of the mag if it's what i think it is.

on the bright side, it may very [i bet it probably will] still turn up. they ran an interview 2 yrs after it was conducted once for my old band... like many things in the DIY world, the execution sometimes doesnt go down as well as the idea. which as a sidebar, makes EA so awesome cuz they conduct themselves like professionals, but in the DIY world - which as illustrated here, isn't always the case.