Rock and Roll McDonald's

Enter the naysayers

Jupiter Research analyst David Card leads the predictable dismissals of our album release plan:

Who Needs Record Labels?

Just about everybody. If they want to make a living, that is. Let alone be a rock star. Pretty good story in the Journal that shows it ain't easy for a band to make it doing the online thing: 92,000 free downloads converted to 600 oniline payers, and a few thousand CD and merchandise sales. And the band, Harvey Danger, doesn't really want to tour. Good luck.

It's almost as if Mr. Card doesn't know what the realities are in the industry from a band/artist standpoint, or even looked into what the typical conversion rates are for free-distribution models (it's around 1%). And again, the short-term thinking -- what is it with these guys?

People will often fixate on the low conversion percentages, but what matters in the end is not the percentage, but the absolute number, since our marginal costs of distribution are so low.

Ultimately, in our case, the final evaluation comes down to this: are we better off doing this than attempting a traditional let's-find-a-label route? A near-sold-through first pressing and recouping almost half our expenses with scant distribution, little promotion, and no touring, after four years of inactivity (and within seven weeks, no less), would incline me to say yes. But the answer will be more definitive in six months or so, after we give people time to digest and listen to the album.

current download count: 96,170

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.

Crazy times

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!

A few notes

It's late, but I wanted to post a few comments, seeing how our album release plan made Slashdot this morning.

First, let me reiterate that we are not pretending to be the first band to do this, or be the first band to give their music away. Hundreds upon thousands of other bands already give their music away. And while we were on a major label, we are no longer (have not been for a while) -- we have paid for and are doing all the work involved ourselves.

We're not releasing things in this manner to make a big statement. Other bands (Wilco, Fiona Apple come to mind) have used these tools already to their advantage. What we're interested in is seeing if this is a viable economic model for artists, especially artists that may be where we are in our careers/lives. A different way of doing things that takes advantage of the strengths of today's technology.

Record labels will cling to and fight for old models because that's all they know (and change is always frightening). But there's no reason why artists should be limited to just that model. Part of this experiment is to see/demonstrate that doing things in this manner can work, that it is a viable option -- both artistically and economically.

It's highly unlikely that we're going to get rich off this -- and none of us are planning on quitting our day jobs -- but what this method gives us is an audience and, over the long term, the financial capitalization -- and therefore the independence -- to continue making music the way we would like to. And that's the important part. How many bands had their best work ahead of them, yet couldn't reach their audience, got caught up in the label machine, or simply couldn't get noticed by a label? I can name a few in each case, and that's only those that I know of.

I would also like to point add that this is also not some throwaway album that we slapped together in a few months for a couple hundred bucks. Production costs were a little over $30,000 and it was written over the course of a year; recording took about a month. (You indie rockers should note that we pulled in both John Goodmanson and Steve Fisk to co-produce the album -- it wasn't me in our practice space recording stuff onto my laptop.) We had it mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling. In all respects all aspects of production were exactly like what we would've done for a major/indie release -- and in fact, when we originally recorded the album that's where we thought it would end up.

(As a personal aside, woo hoo! Slashdot and Boing Boing! How cool is that? The rest of the band might not understand, but....)

And we're off...

Just finished the final part (and biggest if) of our album release plan: the band's entire album, as a direct download, for free, off the band's website (actually, it's not a single site, since we've broken the parts up and distributed them across multiple providers for reliability/scalability -- my CS profs would be proud). Help yourself to it here.

So there it is. I suppose personally this ranks among the biggest gambles I've ever made in my life; all my savings went into the album's production. So even if the plan fails miserably, at least I can say I put my money where my mouth is; it's one thing to give away something that someone else (i.e. a label) paid for, and it's another thing entirely to give away something you paid for.

Speaking of mouths, I got to run mine for a good while earlier today on this week's segment of The Works with host John Moe, discussing the album's release strategy. It's a lot of stuff (depending on how he's putting it together) that I intend on writing about here, but never can find the time to. I hope I was able to come across as at least halfway articulate -- but I'll find out soon enough.

The segment airs tomorrow (Tuesday) night on KUOW (94.9 FM in Seattle) at 8:30 p.m. If you miss it or don't live in the area, you can listen to it via podcast.

UPDATE: The interview with me is the second segment of the show, which starts around 24 minutes into the broad/pod cast.

Little by Little ... on the DL

Note: This is the text of a statement that will be posted to the band site later today. -- j.

Why we're releasing our latest album for free on the Internet

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at http://www.harveydanger.com. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Of course, the CD will also be for sale on the site, as well as in fine independent record stores across the country, in a deluxe package that includes a 30-minute bonus disc that serves as a companion piece to the record proper (retail price for the package is $11.99).

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record.

However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign, along with radio and press promotion, live shows, and videos. It’s a bet that the resources of the Internet can make possible a new way for musicians to find their audience – and forge a meaningful artistic career built on support from cooperative, not adversarial, relationships.

We realize that digital files are the primary means by which a huge segment of the population is exposed to new music; we also believe that plenty of music lovers in the world will buy a record once they’ve heard it – whether via radio or computer.

We also believe there’s an inherent qualitative difference at work—not only between MP3s and CDs, but between clicking a mouse and finding a record on the shelves of a good record store. These experiences are not mutually exclusive – they’re interdependent facets of music fandom, and equally important considerations for a band in our position.

Even with the proliferation of websites and magazines paying attention to independent music these days, it remains difficult for bands—especially rock bands—to get exposure, regardless of how good they may be (or how successful they once were). Making the record freely downloadable removes the main barrier that exists between an artist and the world of potential listeners. And we do mean world; the web’s reach is everywhere.

Whether or not people will buy something they can get for free is obviously a big question, and there are facts and figures to support both sides of the argument. We think it’s not only possible, but likely. The more fundamental challenge is ensuring people have access to your work to begin with.

At the risk of sounding Pollyanna-ish, making records has never been about making money for this band. If the worst thing that happens is a whole bunch of people hear the album and no one buys it, we’ll know our experiment was costly. But that won’t make it a failure.

This is by no means a manifesto. We don’t pretend to be the first band to spin a variation of the shareware distribution model. We love record labels and record stores. We buy lots of CDs and are committed to supporting independent music. We’re not a bunch of fake Marxists. We’re just trying to be smart capitalists so we can sustain our lives as musicians. This is an experiment. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the record. Everything else is secondary.