Creators' Freedom Project
Empowering Creators to Take Control of Their Own Business by Leveraging their Core Skillset — Creativity
A project to understand the needs of creators, highlight and experiment with replicate-able models that help independent artists make a living from their creativity. We'll explore the use of a number of online and tech tools and offerings of scarce goods & unique experiences to discover fans and the merchandise / performances that they want.
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6 posts tagged sales
Bandcamp’s Analytics Shows It’s Making Lemonade from Free Lemons
Bandcamp has a great post on their blog showing the results of inbound website traffic data. At least for Bandcamp, it shows that some users of freeloader websites still end up buying music, with a number of great examples.
It ends with some inspiring hope from the innovative company:
When we first launched Bandcamp, the conventional wisdom was that music retail was moribund, and that artists’ futures were all about those terrifically lucrative tours you guys go on, supplemented perhaps by trickle-down advertising revenue generated by millions of listeners enjoying your tunes while doing their best to ignore ads for toothpaste. Fortunately, it appears there’s still a thriving community of fans who understand that the best way to support the artists they love is by handing them money.
This is some amazing progress for independent artist. We talk in our Rock Your Net workshops about strategically using YouTube videos as a way to attract new fans to learn more about you.
Until now, you had to link away from YouTube to be able to sell or give something away to a potential fan. But no longer. YouTube has partnered with a number of amazing service providers to enable artists to sell merchandise, downloads, and concert tickets right from the base of your YouTube video. Those services are being provided by Topspin, Songkick, iTunes and Amazon.
They’re also making it easier for content owners to signup to potentially monitize their Youtube content using their content ID system.
Pitchfork: Flying Lotus Gives Away Music Via Cool Web App
As a bonus to fans who have previously purchased Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma, the band came up with an innovative way to give loyal fans even more. Just flash your vinyl, CD or print-out of a digital PDF liner notes in front of your computer’s webcam, and a web app will analyze what the camera sees as a way to prove the purchase, and unlock new tracks to download!
Apparently put together by the band’s label, Warp Records, it’s an interesting way to continue to engage and respect existing fans using the original paid purchase as a jumping-off point. It’s also a clever leverage of a physical, scarce good to distribute a digital, non-scarce good — if the digital downloads are only available to the fan if they’ve purchased the physical goods, are they still scarce?
Belle and Sebastian Fan to Win One-Off Experience
Matador Records’ artists Belle and Sebastian are set to release their new album entitled Write About Love Oct. 12. Purchasers of the new album will receive more than just 43 minutes and 21 seconds of thoughtfully written poppie-goodness, they will have the opportunity to connect directly with the band in special way.
Album copies included a unique code to be entered at a website that asks the fan to write 300 words about love. From the submissions, the band will pick a winner, and Belle and Sebastian’s lead singer-songwriter Stuart Murdock will come to the winner’s town to hang out for an afternoon. Even more awesome is that Murdock will write a song about the winner which will be released on a special 7” record next year!
Clearly the band and label are trying something very interesting with Write about Love’s contest that could be very engaging for fans. It’s a chance for many fans to have a bit of interaction with the band by submitting their thoughts on “love,” but for one lucky fan, a chance to chill with a key figure of Belle and Sebastian, and be a permanent part of the band’s song-history.
Belle and Sebastian’s contest is a very interesting one that pushes a number of strategies for the band (presuming they were thinking about it strategically, instead of just offering a great opportunity to interact with fans). A few points:
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Here, it was found that record sales have never been a large part of the annual revenue of artists. In 1999, 70% of the artists made less than 9% of their total income from record sales, and in 2009 this went down to 50%.
Live performances are the major source of income for most artists. 37% of Norwegian artists made more than 50% of their income from live performances in 2009, up from 25% in 1999.
