August
10
Time to round this off with a bit of a summary, I think. The album Bass Music Sessions has now been available for 5 months(!), solely through
our one site on Bandcamp, so I guess we can start to draw a few conclusions about what worked and what didn't, what the benefits and drawbacks were.
To recap, for those who haven't been following the series (links above!) - myself and Baobinga decided to release an album on a 'pay what you want' basis; although all monies would be going to charity. We mastered the album ourselves, did all the press and online PR ourselves, set up a download site at
Bandcamp, and posted about it on this here blog. We did for a while have a permanent player on the front page of the blog, until the code must have changed because it started messing with the formatting of the site.
So, how did it go? Well, overall we're pretty pleased. I spent a long time assembling a load of blogs to email, and mailed them all individually - we eventually amassed about 70 blog posts on various sites, which was a great amount of coverage. And from here springs lesson one. Of course, you need to get your name out there, mail blogs and sites and people to let them know what you're doing, but importantly, people respond more to the personal touch. From that experience, and later events where I helped some other people out by hitting up some blogs for them, I noticed that people were much more likely to reply and post if it's the actual artist emailing them (I'm the same with the blog, in fact. I'm more likely to reply if a producer emails me, than if I get a mail from a PR company), and if the artist emails them individually rather than as part of a mass mailout.
Another positive from this, of course, is that having done the initial groundwork, I still had a large spreadsheet of blogs that I could use in future for when I had a mix or free track to promote. So that was a collateral benefit, which you'd normally have to pay for access to via a PR company.
Anyway, let's have a look at the numerical results. Below is a graph of downloads over time. You can see that the long tail is basically an inexorable decline, and I don't think there's much you can do to fight it. We tried a few things - which I'll detail shortly - and though they might have increased the downloads slightly, or at least delayed the slowdown, it was small beans compared to the hit of the first week.
Statistics:
Total label page visits: 42842
Total track streams: 41997
Total downloads of the full album: 3407
Single track downloads: 809
Donations: 359
Average donation (mean): £2.92
Average donation (median): £2.00
Total received (before paypal deductions): £1048.39
So - 1048 pounds, eh? Or, about £957 after paypal had taken their cut. This is much more than we'd expected, and I'd say not bad for an underground dance music album - especially where payment wasn't compulsory. I've mused elsewhere about whether the charity element would have encouraged - or not - people to donate (still not sure) but some back-of-an-envelope maths suggests that compared to a conventional release, this is OK. For the artists to make £1000 on an album, even in the relatively enlightened sphere of dance music where there's usually a 50/50 label/artist split, it would require the retailers to take something like £4000 (if we assume that mastering and PR was done for free, as in our case. Which would be hard to arrange). Or, roughly 650 paid downloads from iTunes or Beatport at £6.99 a pop. We made the same amount from 359 donations of £2.92. But we did spend a lot more time on it. It's hard to compare like with like, though - by making our album only really available from one source, we removed any chance of casual shoppers finding it whilst browsing iTunes, for instance.
What else? Well, we tried a couple of other things to boost downloads - we gave away the samples to some of the tracks (
still available here) - which had a small boost, but my suspicion is that because we had already done a similar maneouvre a few months previously -
with Tongue Riddim - there lacked the 'shock of the new'. We certainly had less remixes sent in to us the second time, and so I guess this was lesson 2 - try to be novel and fresh with your approach. If something was interesting and successful the first time, you can't just do the same thing again and expect the same result; you'll have to do something a bit different the next to keep people's attention.
We also didn't have a launch party for the album, and I think this was certainly a mistake. I've covered this one before, and we're not promoters, but we could have probably arranged something, and having posters all over town with the album launch details wouldn't have hurt.
Most of this is a big recap though - never mind all this tinkering at the edges, did it work overall? Was it worth doing and is this a sustainable way to run things? Well, the first, obvious answer is no, not really. Not like this; even if we were going to keep all the money, a thousand pounds between two people for what probably amounted to 6 weeks work each is clearly not enough to live on. Even if you double that, you're still way below minimum wage. But, what about live stuff? The exposure! Artists should give away music for free, and live off the shows, yes? Well, as far as we can tell, the album has had a fairly minimal effect on our bookings. I've had one gig that I can directly attribute to the album; but in general over the last few months my gigs have been about normal; Baobinga hasn't noticed any significant change either. I've always been sceptical about that argument in fact - it would seem to me, that the more artists have to rely on live shows to make up their income, the more the supply of performers increases, and thus prices drop as an increased number of artists compete for the same amount of Friday and Saturday night gigs.
Of course, the obvious rejoinder to all this would be that we're just not big/popular enough, or working in a big/popular enough scene. Fair enough. It does seem however, that this model is not (yet) a realistic alternative to having an album out through the conventional channels - which is slightly frustrating as an artist, when you see the size of the cut that Beatport and iTunes take - but I do think that the promotional push you can achieve from a decent label with a trusted brand behind it is currently more effective than doing everything yourself, from scratch.
I mentioned a 'collateral benefit' above, and there have been a few. Firstly, the 'PR database'. Since doing this album, I've managed to build up a list of around 400 blogs which I can email if I've got anything they might be interested in. I've used it a couple of times when I had mixes or free tracks, and it helped gain some attention. Second, we've now got a mailing list of approaching 4,000 names, people who actually like and are interested in our music. I haven't mailed them yet, because I'm wary of spam so want to keep the updates pretty occasional, but will be doing so shortly (hello!). This is probably a pretty valuable asset, too. Third, the experience, and this is something that's definitely valuable, on an intangible sort of level. I've learned a lot from this project, and had some ideas of what I can do in future. On which note, stay tuned - we'll have an announcement in the next week or 2 about that.
One other lesson that came to the fore, is that basically you need to have the full package - there are no shortcuts. By this, I mean that you have to promote yourself well, but you also have to have good music, you also have to have a decent image/press kit/contacts/support/etc. Any given event (such as this) can only help so much - i.e. if you're an unknown, giving away a free album won't turn you into Wiley overnight. If you're not a very good producer, giving away a free album won't make everyone like you. There is no bypassing the need for good music and committed fans, but things like this can be useful tools in adding a bit of momentum to the trajectory of your profile.
So, all in all, yes, I'd say it was worth doing. Financially, not really, but then most stuff at this level of dance music tends not to be massively financially rewarding anyway, and we didn't lose anything. On other levels though, it was a great learning experience and has given us plenty of food for thought. We hope it's given you some food for thought too - if there's anything you'd like to ask, hit us up in the comments, or on thebassmusicblog AT gmail DOT com, and we'll try to answer everything.
Thanks to everyone who's been involved; everyone who's helped us out, blogged us, tweeted, downloaded, and especially everyone who donated. We're chuffed that we were able to write out such a hefty cheque to Dove House Hospice, and we know they're delighted too.
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