There's no easy way I've seen. From experience and the length of time I've been here, I've been able to determine some of the more active believers with similar tastes to me, but there's no easy way to bookmark believer profiles, so I have to keep my own list of believers I need to visit every so often to see if they've picked up someone new that I might have missed in my trawl through all the new artists.
One tactic you might be able to use to help you is to look through the top artists on the site and find some with similar music to yours. Then from this, you'll probably pick up believer names that most or all of these artsts have in common. From this, you'll probably also notice some of these names posting a lot to other artists round the site. They are probably a good starting point of people to contact, providing you remember to read their info before you leave them any messages. If you can get some of these people exchanging messages with you regularly (and hopefully believing in you too), others will pick up on you automatically because they can see you're out there.
Logical-one used to have a section on
her website with a list of believers, how they liked to be contacted and a list of genres, but I can't find it now (if it's still on there)
If a believer has set up their jukebox settings it would theoretically be possible for SAB to write something to collect that data and produce a listing for artists from it based on the genres of the artist requesting a list. An extra checkbox to toggle whether the believer is included in the list sent to artists would be pretty much all that would be required for believers who didn't want to be spammed by that method.
I'm wondering if this might be (yet) another one for
Club Sellaband though. Tools to help artists and believers find each other are probably one of the things the community is most desperate for.
We do have a BIG problem as the site grows though. I did a few calculations the other day based on what I try and do most if not every day on the site. OK these are only rough, but it should give you a good idea of the problem by the time I'm through.
As an artist on SAB, we'll assume you have 3 songs loaded. If each song is 5 minutes in length, that means it's going to take me 15 minutes to listen to your songs (I'm probably reading your profile info and looking at any website/myspace profiles while I'm listening). That means, that as a believer, I can listen to 4 artists on Sellaband every hour. In reality, I probably listen to an average of 6 every hour, because there aren't always 3 songs and often they're less than 5 minutes each, but even so that's not THAT many.
Now I'm lucky - I work from home, so I have no boss looking over my shoulder and hence I CAN listen to a lot of artists in a day, but if you think about it, the average person is probably going to struggle to find enough time to listen to more than about 10-20 artists every time they visit SAB if they actually want a life outside SAB. Hence I know quite a few believers use the jukebox to find artists, because they can't even keep up with the number of artists that sign up to SAB just in the genres they like.
Oh, and of course, remember we have an inbox as well as the ability to leave comments on our pages. Whilst the majority of believers don't penalise artists for leaving comments or messages on their profiles, these all add up in terms of trying to listen to artist requests and leave them comments in return. And of course we've got all our existing artists still trying to get to their 50K telling us about the new song they just posted, the competition they just entered etc. etc. to try and encourage too.
So there IS a danger in making it too easy for artists to find believers, in as much as those who are already drowning under the current "hard" system will just get buried under an avalanche of requests to listen that they don't have a hope in hell of keeping up with. And then that'll lead to more and more believers just ignoring requests to listen which isn't going to help. I'm seeing enough of a trend in that direction already as it is. (I have a feeling the "hype this" section on the Sellaband forum will turn into a dumping ground for artists all saying "listen to me" and it'll get to the stage where nobody'll bother to read it)
Don't forget the extremely poor ratio of believers to artists we have as well. For every artist signed up to Sellaband at the moment there are approximately only THREE believers. Being around SAB and promoting IS important, but so is dragging new believers into Sellaband if you want to make consistent progress and not get "stuck" like so many great talents on here do.
Hope this helps...