We are an independent record label not a big bad corporation out to sue you for file sharing, we WANT you to spread our music around.

With such an overcrowded market place giving away your music is essential in my opinion. The biggest problem for emerging indie artists today is obscurity, not piracy. To find out more listen to The Antiqcool Podcast .

http://antiqcool.podbean.com/2010/01/22/the-antiqcool-podcast-episode-1-how-can-you-be-a-part-of-our-success/

I say keep going with it. Try everything. Offer it for free for a while (say, a month), then offer it for free with an email sign up, then offer it with a $1 minimum. Try all of it. If you can, do A/B testing with your download page to see which one works best for you.

Keep it rockin’!

I guess it depends on your goals but I think the most important thing for a musician that wants to do anything other than hide away at home and play is that people hear their music. By hearing your music I don’t mean just once either. People use Spotify, CDs, vinyl, mp3s and so on to hear your music.

There are lots of factors/barriers involved that stop people from hearing your music and making them pay for it is obviously a major one. Making them provide you with an email address is also a barrier. It is smaller but it’s there.

The location of your music is also a barrier to some. If its only on your website/bandcamp then that stops those that only use Rhapsody/Last.fm etc.

I reckon the majority of people at the moment listen to music on a portable device or on any device and in mp3 format. If you allow people to take away your music for free so they can put it on whatever portable device they use you’re probably gonna reach more people.

Another barrier to consider is credibility. I suspect there are some people who feel a band that charge full price for a CD or download is more credible than one that gives it away. I’m sure the opposite is true for some forward thinkers as well.

Getting back to the issue of free this is my personal experience and I must mention my band is in a totally different genre. I released our album at the end of October, it’s free to stream in full from our website, Spotify, Last.fm and many other places. It appeared on an mp3 sharing blog 5 days after it was released so I bit the bullet and ‘leaked’ it to the other major file sharing blogs I knew of and asked that they use my link so I could track downloads. So far we’ve sold 70 CDs and had 1000 free downloads. I can’t track the paid downloads for another couple of months but it will be nowhere 1000 that’s for sure.

Depending on what barriers you identify (and how they apply to your music/genre etc) I would suggest the event should simply be the release of your album and you should make the downloads free and available to all. The paid model should be for the physical item or the live experience or a t shirt or a house show.

You could still allow people to pay for the downloads if they want but the key is to make them free first and allow people to pay if they want. I think this is a subtle but important difference from just a pay what you want model. Some will feel guilt for taking your music for free unless you tell them it’s ok first.

Your question is a good one, and as I said I’m still kind of processing the whole thing. But next time I will probably build some sort of exclusivity into it (see what Rob Michael @atmostrio is doing with charts for one example). I might also try the email capture route just to see what kind of effect that has on the numbers. I really don’t know how people feel about giving out their emails for the music. But I do agree with MrG that it would be good information to have. I’m also trying to think of creative packages to come up with so that there is a free level, but there is also some kind of incentive to bump up to a paid level as well.

Would be great to hear some other ideas. Maybe together we can come up with a model that we can all try?

I’m as ambivalent as Scott about the idea of going “all free, all the time.” If it’s an occasional thing, that also means it’s more of an “event” — just like a traditional “blow out sale” in the brick and mortar world — and the story behind that, plus the expiration date, is at least in part what drives new people to come check out what you’re offering.

Also worth considering: that segment of the listening audience (some of whom surely reside in the jazz community) who thrive on exclusivity, and who are drawn to a given artist not because their work is cheap or free but because their work is hard-to-obtain and/or expensive. That would be the segment that could be appealed to with extras that weren’t offered for free (additional mixes, out-takes, video, etc.).

My only question: based on this experience, have you thought of any ways to improve a similar sale in the future? I.e., would you do anything differently next time?

In any case, great job, and thanks for sharing your thoughts on what happened.

And thanks Sunna and Scott for your thoughts too. I used to offer the low-rate downloads free until Bandcamp got rid of them. Is there still a way to do ths.

MrG – I intentionally did not want to make people give me their email address for this promotion. I wanted it to be truly free, with no strings attached. However, now that I’m back to the paid model I do require anyone downloading to give me their email. As for the folks who did download, I hope to make contact with a number of them through Twitter. Do you have any other suggestions on how to go about that? I would welcome your input.

Do you suppose, after you made this personal contact, contact that asks THEM for their real human help, do you suppose if the tour got set up that they’d come to see you?