Product Review: Celebrity Access
MusicBizAdvice.com reviews products, services, and tools for your music
business career. Here we discuss the music industry contact database, Celebrity
Access.
Are you a busy music industry executive who needs to save time and phone
calls? Are you an agent searching for potential clients for a hot new A-list
agency no one knows you're planning to open yet? Are you an assistant whose
boss has asked you to confidentially research artist availability, fees, and
requirements for an upcoming charity event?
Celebrity Access may be just
the tool you need.
Celebrity Access is an annual subscription service containing a "state of
the art database" with profiles on over 30,000 performers, including
musicians, comedians, and lecturers. On the Net since 1998, C.A. is used by
music industry talent buyers, agents, management companies, record labels,
media companies, event planners, and speakers bureaus to find talent and
locate contact numbers for their representatives.
In addition to information on talent and their representatives, you'll also
find fee ranges for the artist, the artist's backline requirements,
assistant's names, and even the artist's bio.
Our favorite part of Celebrity Access? The creators of the database were
especially thorough, so each entry is cross-referenced multiple ways,
allowing for searches by artist, manager, roster, responsible agent, price
range, and venue size. We're sure there are many other ways as well, and our
own tests of searching and cross-searching failed to reveal any omissions in
any of the cross-referenced entries we tried.
Not sure how to get in touch with that hotshot mailroom guy you worked with
ten years ago who's now a key player at a management company on the other
coast? Type in his name, and even if the company name escapes you, his
current company information comes up.
Celebrity Access also contains tour dates, box office results, tour history
information, and news archives, so you can verify whether an artist really
sold out as many shows as that overzealous rep you met backstage claims he did. For those only interested
in the here and now, you'll also find industry news, company comings and
goings, signings, profiles, release date information, and industry postings.
The downside? One bio we looked at wasn't the artist's most current, but
it's a minor point easily solved with a quick phone call to get the current
one, and Celebrity Access encourages users to send in corrections. Having used
Celebrity
Access ourselves over the years, the only real downside we can find is the
price: at $799 for an annual subscription, this definitely ain't kid stuff. But given
the scope and confidentiality of the information on Celebrity Access,
it shouldn't be available to everyone, so we really can't even quibble about
that. Simply put, we love it!
Score: **** ¾ out of Five stars
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