What news this week?  Well,  it's all about the long tail now.  We've done the big push at the start, we've done the remix parts giveaway, we've had the reviews, we've had our friends tweeting about the album.  As you can see from the graph below, nothing much is doing - we even had one day last week where it only shifted 6 downloads.  Eek!  Fortunately, there was a slight bump shortly afterwards:

I'll skip the overall figures, but in the last week we've done 1203 visits to the label page, 2280 track plays, 106 full album downloads, and had 11 donations totalling £39.97

I mentioned the other week; what can you do once that initial rush has passed?  Back in the day, it was the opposite curve; in the 60's for instance, a band would release a single and then work it relentlessly by touring it.  They'd play shows in their local area, get local radio supporting, then move onto the next state, all the while introducing more people to their sound and with any luck, the record would inch up the charts  over a period of weeks or months.  These days of course, everything is the other way around; if something doesn't go top 10 in the week of release, it's deemed a failure and everyone moves onto the next thing.

So, what can we do to 'work' it?  Obviously, geographical exposure doesn't count for anything these days; you can hear a record released in London or Seattle or Moscow on the same day, there's no barrier there.  I suppose, instead, it's getting into other communities, if you'll pardon the web2.0 terminology.  I was recently browsing the Free Music Archive (really good site by the way, have a look around, and don't miss the WFMU blog to be introduced to some seriously out-there but cool music) - and thought I might drop them an email, see if they'd be up for archiving our album too.  Indeed they were, so I got my arse into gear and uploaded it.  They kindly featured it on the blog, and I can see now that it's had 820 plays in the four days since; a healthy addition to our bandcamp coverage.  In addition, the next day our bandcamp site took 20 quid in donations; that's half our total for the week.  Looks like it helped.  

So, perhaps making your stuff available across numerous sites, 'portals' and platforms is a better way to go?  I had thought that putting the album up for download at one particular place and directing everyone to that would be ok - but perhaps that limits your exposure in some ways; especially (thinking about it now) amongst the people who would otherwise have a listen, but don't actually know that they like 'bass music' or 'dubstep' or whatever.  It can be easy to get so caught up in your scene that you forget there are people out there who couldn't tell you the difference between dub and dubstep, even though they actually like, buy, listen to, one or both genres.  

So, next step, I guess, is to get on a hunt and see what other 'archive' sites there are around, see if we can't get on a few more of those.   The downside is that you can't really track what it's doing for your downloads, but I think we're getting to the point now where little will pull sudden, dramatic new numbers of people to the label page, apart from a new release (stay tuned for that one) - so it can't hurt.  

Anyway, have a good weekend, we're off to inspect the mighty new Bass Music HQ (photos to follow).

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