Streaming service Rdio has launched an innovative Artist Program, giving musicians a (potentially) more viable way to make money through streaming. Through the program, artists can make $10 for every fan they bring in to subscribe to the streaming service.
A problem that many have noticed (and tried to work around) in Bandcamp is the lack of any option to sell your merch. This morning, they announced that they have fixed that issue!
Keep reading for photos and more details!
There are many arguments against giving away your music for free. While a good portion of independent artists do this, we need to look at the potential damage you are doing to your career before deciding if it is the right choice for you. Today, the people at Independent Music Advice share with us their opinion and why they think it is never a good idea.
The Problem With Giving Out Too Much Free Music
It Doesn’t Make People Want To Listen To You Any More.
Just because you give out your audio as a free download, it doesn’t mean that you will get a lot of people downloading it. Even if you hand someone out a free CD, there’s no guarantee that person will go on to listen to it. Many times people have given me free CDs at events and shows. Do I go on to listen to all of them? No. And I know a lot of people are the same.It takes more then just giving someone your music for them to listen, you have to give them a reason to want to listen. If you don’t do that, your CD will end up at the bottom of a pile and never get played.
Now the interesting thing; If you can give people a reason to want to listen to your music, you won’t have to give your music out for free! You will be able to ask for something in exchange, and they will be willing as they already have it in their mind they want to hear your music. This largely makes giving your music out for free obsolete.People Start To Expect It.
If you always give your music out for free, people will come to expect it. So when you start to make more of a name and you decide you want to start charging for your music, you will have a hard time selling it. After all, the majority of your fan base is made up of people who are in it for the freebies. As soon as they see they have to start paying now, many of your fans will disappear. They already have a load of your music, so what’s pushing them to get any more?
While you may get some that stay and don’t mind paying for your music, you will look back and realise you spent a lot of time and effort making people happy who didn’t benefit your career in any way. Not a good feeling at all.Your Music Will Have A Lower Perceived Value.
Perceived value is what people think your product is worth. If something is widely available for free, people will naturally feel like it’s not worth as much as it’s easy to obtain. This is how a lot of people think about music right now.If however something is harder to obtain or it’s a higher price, people naturally think it’s of a better quality. Because of this, it’s sometimes possible to raise the price of your product and make more sales then if you set a lower price point.
You of course don’t want to charge so much that it’s not worth buying your music, but giving it all away for free will definitely make people perceive your music to have less value.
You’ll Lose Money.
Making good quality music isn’t free. You have to pay to use the recording studio, for the cost of pressing up products, for marketing and promotion expenses, and for anything else that needs to be done. If you do all of this only to give your music out for free, you are losing out on money. And where does that money come from? My guess is your own pocket.You shouldn’t be paying to make other people happy, it should be a two way thing. You should benefit from people hearing your music, and you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for something in exchange for your songs.
You Will Lose Motivation.If you keep spending money on creating music that people don’t end up downloading, you will eventually lose motivation. If you lose motivation, what’s to keep you making music any more?
What You Should Be Doing Instead
Instead of letting people download your music for nothing in return, you should only allow people to download some of your songs if they help you out in some way. This could be them giving you their contact details, or by them promoting your music in some way. This is a win win situation for everyone. They get to download your music and learn about you, and you get to keep in contact with them or have them promote you to all their friends.We call the songs we use in this exchange process ‘promotional songs’, and cover this strategy in a lot more detail here. In that article we look at how to give out your promotional songs (And the best way to maximise their effect), the single to promotional songs ratio, how to encourage more people to download your promotional songs, how you can use your promotional songs to encourage people to buy your paid releases, and much more.
This is only a portion of a very helpful article, so be sure to visit the link above to read the whole thing.
As an independent artist, do you give your music away for free? What made you decide to do so?
Image by Sam Wells
Do only about 15% of vinyl records actually get reported to SoundScan? Someone from Gotta Groove Records just told the New York Times that most of what they press doesn’t even get a bar code (which means it would not be reported).
We know that many artists who press vinyl are indie musicians. A lot of these artists don’t even know they should be bar coding and reporting their sales through SoundScan.
Could the real vinyl sales be at much as 7 times higher?
As an artist, do you report your sales to SoundScan? Were you even aware that you needed to?
Image via CrunchBase
According to Hypebot, the lack of iTunes (and Apple in general) as an official partner of Facebook will severely decrease the number of songs and albums purchased digitally. They do state that many songs have iTunes integration within them, just not from Facebook itself.
On the other side of things, Spotify’s CEO told us yesterday that Spotify users who are socially connected through Facebook are far more likely to make digital purchases of the music they are listening to.
Do you think the lack of official partnership is hurting the music industry as the author suggests?
As an artist or a fan, the influence Spotify has created quickly within the U.S. is obvious. Additionally, we have seen in the past that it is extremely popular in Europe, even having people say that it has conquored music piracy all together in some places. Forward thinking musicians then go on to the next question: How can I get my music on Spotify? Luckily, artists do not need to be signed to a label to be able to do this. It’s actually a fairly simple process, but you don’t go through Spotify directly.
The people you need to go through are the artist aggregators who work directly with Spotify to help artists license their music. Currently, the music streaming service works with the following companies:
As you can see, there are a variety of options within this list. As an artist, you should look carefully at the benefits of each aggregator and see which suits your needs, and budget, the best. Also, it is important to be sure what you, as a customer, need to do to make sure your music gets on the streaming service.
Spotify also tells artists to be patient, as it can take four to six weeks before you see your music there.
Thanks to Universal Republic Records for sharing this breakdown of how “[They] Break New Artists.” What about social media? It would be interesting to look into the social media marketing campaign for The Band Perry to see what they are using.
What do you think of this breakdown?
Vinyl record sales have been soaring in the last couple of years, a resurgence that many bands are taking advantage of. Fans love collectibles, and it looks that vinyl purchases may be a cost-effective way to increase your merchandise sales. Could the vinyl record come back to replace the enormous losses that the CD industry has left?
Already in 2011, vinyl record sales are up 41%. Thanks to Digital Music News and Nielsen Soundscan for the statistics and graph found below:
Do you think vinyl could save the physical goods sector of the music industry?
Towards the end of last month, Nine Inch Nails fans were given the opportunity to remix tracks off of the band’s album, Year Zero. User could purchase the master tracks (bundled with Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, a remix album by Trent Reznor), and share their creative projects that use the songs to remix.nin.com. Unfortunately for the creative fans, Universal has just decided that, because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this could lead to unintentional copyright infringement issues for the label.
Their premise is that if any fan decides to remix one of my masters with material Universal doesn’t own – a “mash-up”, a sample, whatever – and upload it to the site, there is no safe harbor under the DMCA (according to Universal) and they will be doing exactly what MySpace and YouTube are doing. – Reznor via his blog.
It seems Reznor is not supportive, but understand the basis for taking down the site and stopping the project in its tracks. He had already planned to separate from Universal, and has shared his plans to distribute his music directly to fans.
Do you think Universal was right to take down the remix site?
