Is Slicethepie Legit? My Personal Experience
Program: SliceThePie
Rating: 4/5
Website: slicethepie.com
Verdit: LEGIT!
Slicethepie – What’s the Deal!?
What exactly is Slicethepie? Well, it’s basically like a community project – it matches up unsigned artists with music fans, and pays people to review new songs. It’s great for new artists, because it allows them additional exposure and helpful music critique, and it’s cool for reviewers, because it gives them a chance to get paid while listening to new tunes. It’s really a win-win situation.
Oh, and if you’re still wondering “is Slicethepie legit?” – yes. They really will pay people for reviewing music!
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 you get paid per 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.
But even after reviewing songs for an entire hour, (and at 15 cents per song) I was only paid $1.46. I wasn’t reviewing the entire time, I stopped in between here and there – but for the most part I was pretty focused on the reviews.
Update – I find after doing it for awhile, it does flow more naturally and it’s easier to write varied reviews. I spent probably about 45 minutes rating some more songs and my balance shot up a little –
It actually takes time to think about the music and write something of quality – you can’t write a review that just says, “Cool tune, bro“, or “Man that sucks monkeys…“
See, that is what happens! You have to write something of substanance for them to accept it. You really need to have a good grasp of music termonology here.
Something I found really annoying about their system is many times when you submit the review, it’ll tell you that your score (the rating you gave it on a 1-10 scale) will vary significantly from the review you gave. It’s obviously a computer system picking up on it, but it isn’t very sophisticated. It’ll scan your review for particular words and if you have any negative words within the review but end up giving it a better score as a whole, like above a 7 – it’ll freak out and think you’re review doesn’t make sense.
For example, if I talk about how the song is amazing, the singing is great and has a fun melody and beat, but mention the lyrics are a bit too repetitive, and end up giving the song a 7 as a whole, it’ll pop up with the “the rating you gave varies significantly from your review” message. Obviously my review is in more detail, but you probably get the point. Their system thinks it can scan a review and connect it to a rating, but it is horrible at doing its job.
Then, I end up getting this email:
We hope you’re enjoying reviewing. We’ve noticed your reviews can be quite disjointed which makes them difficult to read. Please note that your reviews go straight to artists and so we’d encourage you to write lengthy, detailed and constructive reviews that comment on a number of aspects of the track. For example: beat, melody, instruments, vocals, production, commercial potential etc. The following article was written by one of our scouts and will help you to improve your reviews:http://chasmac.hubpages.com/
I try to write the best reviews I can, but they’re obviously very picky about the reviews they recieve. This makes it really difficult to do it if you don’t actually have a passion and appreciation for all types of music. It also makes the few cents you get for the review almost not even worth it. You really do need to put in a bit of effort to your reviews and it can be very time consuming.
SlicethePie Payment Proof
Here’s a screenshot of Slicethepie delivering my payment into Paypal. It probably took me about 2 hours total to earn the $10. Like I said, this is not a way to get rich; but it is a fun thing to do to earn some extra cash.
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.
My final opinion….
Overall this site is awesome 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.
Go rate some sweet new tunes at Slicethepie!
If you enjoy the tasks, the money is really just a bonus. Otherwise it isn’t worth your time if you want to do it just for the paycheck. Unless $1.46 per hour is worth it to you…
Wendy,
Owner, SurvivingAfterCollege.com
Want to be more productive with your time?
About The Author
wendyjane
Hi, I’m Wendy. After graduating college back in 2009, I was fed up with the horrible job market and the never ending job search, so I decided to take a different route and start my own business online. I now have nearly 2 years of hands on experience in the field and am a full time internet marketer, blogger, and web designer. You can also find me as an active member over at the Wealthy Affiliate community.
I have no idea whats happening to me every time i go on this fucking site and make a review over like 10 minutes and then after my fingers are all fucked up a message pops up saying Hold up take a breath use a bit of punctualiti or some shit like that HELP ME
If I have a 50 percent rank how long would it take to earn about 300 dollers on this site how much work whould I need to put in per day ?
In order to earn 300 dollars you’d have to spend A LOT of time doing this. It took me about 1 hour to earn $1.50… so if you were aiming for 300 that would be 200 hours… over 8 days straight! You also can get paid for referrals and get 10% of their earnings, so it may make it easier, but it’s still pretty much next to nothing. For example, I have about 15 referrals on Slicethepie and I’ve earned just over ONE dollar combined from them all in the past 2 months!
If you are looking to make that type of money online, I suggest you check out my #1 recommendation.
So my question is this: when you try to submit a review and get the error screen, do they still get your review? Is there a way to track your reviews after submitting them? It seems to me, based on comments on this site and others, that they will do anything to get your review without paying. It’s all well and good to say “do this for fun not money,” but they are not doing it for fun, they are trying to make money. I haven’t seen any explanation of how they profit. Do bands pay them for membership? They aren’t a non-profit so they are trading on your work, and every time they get a review without having to pay for it (multiply that $.02 or that $10 minimum withdrawal by however many reviewers they have to get an idea of their costs), it might just be gravy for them, or it might actually be a crucial piece of their model. That is what I want to know. You can write reviews for free on Youtube and link them on whatever social media you use if you just want to help bands get noticed.
FWIW, their Craigslist posting advertises earnings of $120/month, without any explanation in that ad or on their website of how to achieve that, and, while that’s not a TON of money, it’s not nothing. It would cover my cable bill, or my monthly grocery bill, like two months worth of electricity, couple weeks of gas, etc. so, again, you can say “do it for fun the money’s not worth it” or “it isn’t a scam if you can do it for free,” but its not free if I’m spending time at it, and I’m spending that time based on the appeal of making a small but not insignificant amount of money for something that I might actually enjoy doing. If they weren’t offering payment, I wouldn’t be donating my time for their profit. And there are plenty of other ways to discover new artists that don’t require me to work for someone else’s profit. Dishonesty is dishonesty regardless of whether or not it costs you money. I mean, come on…
Raoul, I agree with you completely. I think it’s shady that CL posting advertises you can make $120 per month and doesn’t specify how .. it would take A LOT of invested time to earn that 120 and would just be silly for anyone doing it soley for money to put in the effort. It’s sort of like those online survery sites that claim you can make “1,000 extra per month!” … realistically there’s just no way and they’re being completely dishonest.
So yeah, they’re not being upfront about what’s involved to actually make that money and they end up misleading people. However, some people honestly really enjoy the music and it is a good spot to hop on and listen to some new tunes, regarless of if you make money or not.. which was my point when I said “just for fun”.
I don’t know if bands pay or how exactly it works. If you have a serious issue with not being credited and feel like it isn’t worth the time then don’t do it. That was my entire point – it IS NOT worth anyone’s time if they’re doing it for money.
Heck you can even work a part time job 2 days a week and earn an extra 100, it’d end up taking a lot less of your time.
If you want to earn extra money online, invest your time wisely and build a web business… it’d be way more profitable in the end.
Does the site really pay out?
Yeah in general they do, I haven’t had any issues. There are some complaints from people claiming they were blocked from receiving payments, although I am not sure what the reasoning behind it was. Again, I would suggest you do this for fun not for money because it really is not worth your time if that is all you’re interested in.
Thanks for the writeup of what to expect with Slicethepie. The FAQs on their site didn’t answer the questions I had, but your post certainly did. Probably not worth my time at 2 cents a song, but something to consider in my down time at the very least.
When I had withdrew my money for 10 dollars, it did not send the money to my paypal, is there a reason for that?
I’m not sure Michael. I would contact SlicethePie and/or Paypal about the issue. Hope you get this resolved!
Hi Wendy, I’ve just started on SliceofPie – is it possible to spend too long on a review? Twice now on two different reviews I have hit Submit and it has told me that an error has occurred and to log in later.
Hey Amanda,
I would assume that’s probably a bug on their end and has nothing to do with the amount of time you’ve spent on the review. I’ve had that happen to me before as well.
Wendy
Don,t be fool people. Mark my words slice the pie will go down in history as one of the biggest scam ever. A couple days ago I had a rating of 70%, and I even promote my referral links viral,and soon as requested my money when it reach $10.00. They email me the next day,and said my account was suspended.. They did,nt consider the fact that I had referrals under me that I was getting paid because I recruited them.In conclusion they are using people,and when they get what they want they will strike ,and flush you like toilet paper.
So sorry to hear about your experience with them John! I’ve never had a problem with them, but unfortunately those types of things happen. I don’t know if I’d classify it as the biggest scam ever since you can use it for completely free. I really think it’s mostly just cool for people who enjoy listening to new music, because I did find it helpful in discovering new artists. I really wouldn’t recommend anyone do it for serious money because it pays like crap and, in your case, didn’t pay at all!