GarageSpin

American Idol recently launched American Idol Underground, a music hosting site capitalizing on the show's brand name and its audience's dreams of stardom.

Any artist can get a free profile page with gig promotion and fan club management.  Song submission, however, requires a $25 (!) per song fee, and gets you guaranteed spins on an appropriate genre channel, contest entries, and unlimited streaming.

It sounds a little like Micro-Payola.  The site is clearly leaching off the brand's name recognition to charge exorbitant song upload fees.  It MIGHT make sense if there was a significant (i.e. HUGE) number of music fans visiting the site...let's check Alexa.

AIU's Alexa ranking is around 49,000, which roughly suggests between 100k and 200k visitors per month; and it's skyrocketing this week.  The question then becomes, how valuable is that traffic to unsigned artists..?  Tough to say.  It's being promoted in Rolling Stone and on FOX.  Hm...interesting.

Well, everyone knows that the best time to watch American Idol is early in the season, when the contestants are made up of flamboyantly eccentric, tone deaf narcisists.  Now we have to sift through varying layers of quality to find the CRAP???  No way!  BRING ME THE BOTTOM OF THE FOOD CHAIN!!!

Anyway.  I still prefer ArtistServer, CD Baby, GarageBand, SoundClick, and a number of music hosting sites for their superior services.  But, I hate to say it, it may be worth keeping an eye on Idol Underground's current traffic increase...