The last several days have been pretty amazing.
Last Tuesday we released the album for direct download on our website. On Wednesday our online distribution plan got picked up by isohunt.com and fazed.com, and we saw traffic jump noticeably. On Thursday night Cory Doctorow posted it to BoingBoing, and traffic jumped even higher. By this time we were noticing referrals from all over the world and referrers from many non-English sites.
Sunday night around midnight it made Slashdot, and Monday afternoon it made Fark -- the combined effect sent traffic through the roof. By Monday night we had recorded 32,152 downloads of the album within 24 hours, bringing our total, since Sept. 20 (when it was first released to Bittorrent) to 51,128 copies downloaded. (As of 45 minutes ago, there have been 62,269 downloads of the album, with more copies being constantly downloaded every minute -- 53 people are downloading it now as I write this.)
Consider that, during our best week in 1998 when "Flagpole Sitta" was absolutely saturating radio and MTV, that our weekly sales peaked somewhere around 27,000 copies per week. Granted, sales and downloads are far, far different things. But consider what it would take to promote and distribute 32,000 copies of a CD all over the world, in 24 hours.
Now note that not only was our cost of distribution (traditionally the most expensive and time-consuming component of getting your music to an audience) minimal, but the access cost to this globally scalable distribution network was almost zero. That's what the Internet gives us. It's an incredibly powerful resource, and to not explore alternative ways of doing things using its strengths is foolish.
With that in mind, I think I'm going to start a separate weblog (along with Erik, who has been very capably handling the nuts-and-bolts of our backend -- which, by the way, held up perfectly fine despite getting Slashdot'd and Fark'd) specifically document how our experiment is going, as it's going. One thing that's been surprising (and gratifying) is the number of people who are rooting for us to succeed with this, and the number of people that are keenly interested in our results. Whether it succeeds or fails I can't predict, but what we can do is report our progress for the world to see so that others can draw from the lessons we learn.
More details on this will be forthcoming, I'll probably have it hosted on typepad and up by the end of the weekend.
-j.
P.S. If you know what I'm talking about, check out what the bittorrent swarm looked like on Monday. Crazy!
wow! i've never seen a swarm like that before! congratulations on the distribution feat alone.
as a side note, can someone point me to the awesome xp theme in that image? :)
Posted by: derek | October 06, 2005 at 08:08 AM
And I just listened to it, and that's gorram good :)
Never underestimate the word of mouth on the Internet, we are mighty powerful :)
I'll be sure to pass the word to my friends here in France :)
Posted by: Pierre | October 13, 2005 at 08:53 AM
Congratulations, you have a fan from way over here in Brunei. Excellent work on 'Little By Little' and hope to hear more from the band.
Posted by: mohamed nazmi | October 21, 2005 at 05:53 AM