Selling my music on a distribution platform.
A few years ago I came to the point that i had a stack of music and nothing to do with it, so I picked out the best bits and stuck them on a free website owned by Wix; there I made a music player with a few tracks to download for the nominal fee of 99p (my research said that's what new music on iTunes go for, so I priced it that way). In about six months of plugging and updating the site I had sold a couple of dozen songs and upgraded the site to be on my own custom domain and get rid of the adverts and get rid of the "wix" logo, as well as give me more flexibility in how I ran and designed my website. Unknown to me at this time, Google was just about to change their search algorithm, which changed how my site appeared in the page listings; basically if you typed in "Unchained Exe.Dist" into google before it came up near the top, afterwards it was pushed down about eight pages with a load of pages with snippets of the search term you typed in. So subsequently my views plummeted and I lost interests from new people. I could have gone up the listings if I paid Google once a month in ad costs, but with only a few sales at this point I didn't have the money to do so.
Then about a year ago I put my new music in albums and stuck them on Bandcamp, again I sold a few dozen, mainly to family and friends, but bandcamp has a rule that you have to earn up to X amount to get your money given to you which was more than my sales and if I sold music to myself I could run the risk of getting banned and losing the money. Even now I have the money sitting there with no access to it which is a bummer.
I obviously run a YouTube channel and its a free source of music of mine to people and a lot of people have said to me what is the point of making albums to sell when you can just go to Youtube, use a program on your home computer, then rip it off and put it on your mp3 player. This when I started putting some of my music on YouTube and storing other really good tracks for newer albums to boost sales interest. But doing so has put pressure on me to post good enough music to YouTube to maintain my hundred views a day, plus music exclusively for Newgrounds, soundcloud as well as create exciting new music to sell, which is a mammoth task. Especially when I work four days a week in the music industry, to live and support my disabled partner (which I co-care for).
So this week I've launched four new albums on CDbaby, where they take a cut of the profits but they actually help you promote your music, as well as giving you HTML links to put on Facebook, wordpress and this site, as you may notice there is now a player on the right hand side, which will allow you to play clips of my unreleased work, as well as my new single. Bandcamp and Wic ever allowed you to link to other sites apart from on facebook (where I don't really have to many connections and it costs a bomb to advertise. (I suppose google ads are expensive as well)).
I have five new albums in the pipeline for release this coming year and will continue to plug my work on as many platforms as possible to gain more interest in my work. I just am slightly fearful that I will annoy someone, but I guess you can't please everyone.
The following links are for my new albums:
The Fat keys Compilation, which is mainly keyboards, pianos and organs:
EDM your Heart Out!, which is Dance, Trance and Electronica:
Do You Love Me (Will You Take Me Back), is a love song with me on piano:
Purely Sequential: which is mainly a compilation of electronica:
There are the following to look forward to that will be all unreleased original material:
Dystopia (penned for release on the 25th Jan 2017),
The Fat keys Collection 4 (will be released in May time),
My Girl compilation (which will be out next week,
Exe.Dist The Rock Collection. (which will be out just before Dystopia!)
And finally: Sitting on the Edge of the known world (which will be out in the summer time).
No comments:
Post a Comment