It's been a busy month

Sorry about the lack of updates. Things have been busy, and hopefully I'll be better about updating this on a regular basis from now on. In that vein, Erik and I have been working on the details of what I suppose I'll refer to as the "tracking blog" for how things are going with the band on the free album front, since, while I'd like to think that everyone who reads this is interested in my personal welfare, I realize most of you are interested in how our whole new-album-as-a-free-download release plan is going.

Speaking of which, I suppose, the lack of updates, explanations, or any sort of recent news results in articles like this one, from Coolfer :

...the moral of the story is this: Giving away music — especially an entire album — gets a little buzz, gets the attention of Boing Boing and may get a few blog links here and there, but it’s still not the cornerstone of a good business plan. It helps people cherry pick those two or three good tracks, though, and it elicits a lot of “Free stuff! Free stuff!” cheers all across the Internet.

Well, hold on now. It's a little curious that people are already doing post-mortems on our little experiment a little more than a month after the album's release. But perhaps it's only a reflection of the increasingly short-term thinking that's become the norm.

One of the key underlying ideas in our strategy is that our timeframe for success is much longer than typical. Because we don't need to maintain the overhead that a label does, because it costs us nothing (save a monthly server bill) to maintain our "distribution network" (aka the Internet), it doesn't hurt us if it takes 9, 12, 18 months to make back our costs.

Second, in order to fail you need to define success. Most labels define success in terms of albums sold, or more generally, profits made. For most artists, however, profit (money) constitutes only a small part of success. Reaching a large, appreciative audience is equally -- if not more -- important. Talk to any band that's gotten a fat bidding war deal, but then had their finished album canned after months of label wrangling, and see how successful they feel. Sure, there's money in the bank, but it's a  miserable experience.

We've spent almost no money on promotion (in fact, we were so late getting CDs back from manufacturing that album reviews are only now coming out), and yet in a little over a month the entire album has been downloaded over 92,000 times (that we've been able to track). Will all of those people become fans? No. Will a large number of them listen and delete? Absolutely. But some percentage will (and have) gone from "never heard of you" to "real fan." And any artist knows that it's the real fans that are your lifeblood, that will sustain you over the long haul -- two, three albums from now.

The goal of this model is not to make outsized returns on investment. It's meant to harness the advantages of digital distribution to an artist's advantage, to try and increase independence, reach, and yes, even profitability (I'll get to this in a future post). It's still entirely possible the plan will fail miserably. But it's far too soon to tell.

Comments

[Elaine]

Just wanted to comment on the free album strategy: I think it's working considering the fact that I have never heard of Harvey Danger and now I am definitely a fan! My motivation for downloading the album was originally, "Hey, free music. Why no?" Hearing the first track totally hooked me. So, play a show in the Chicago area sometime. :}

[Derek]

Well for me the strategy worked. I have been listening to Little by Little constantly. I just purchased Where have all the Merrymakers gone which is excellent. Next purchase will be King James Version and then I will probably buy Little by Little for the second disk. So for me, at least, your strategy is working!! Keep up the good work guys.

[Courtney]

Releasing the cd the way you have is awesome. I downloaded it after I bought it just to have a copy until mine came in. I think this is the way music should be done. I own all the cds (not the eps unfortunately) and will support you guys until the end. keep it smart.