An Argument Against “Pay What You Want” Pricing

by Brian Hazard on February 28, 2012

Lady Gaga shot to the top of the sales charts upon the release of her last album, in part because it was deeply discounted on Amazon. Radiohead pioneered the “pay what you want” approach, with most downloaders opting to pay nothing at all. Last week I asked my fans which pricing model they prefer, and received dozens of enlightening and thoughtful answers. The discussion continues, but as you’ve already deduced from the title of this article, I’ve made my decision.

I tried both approaches over the past two months, with two full-length rarities sets. Both consist of material already released on USB key, so the audience is relatively limited. I sold the first set for $5 with a discount code, and made the second set name-your-price. The latter features more recent recordings, and is clearly the superior release, so there’s little point in comparing sales numbers directly.

Name-your-price certainly has a lot going for it:

• It provides a legal alternative to piracy
• It generates far more downloads, which can boost your mailing list if you require an email address
• Anyone can “own” your album, even in countries with weak economies or rampant piracy (a decent percentage of my downloads were from Russia)
• People are more likely to share a link to a “free” download with their friends
• Potential fans can download first, and decide if they like it later

But in my opinion, those pros don’t offset the cons:

click to continue…

What Artists Should Know About Headliner.fm

by Brian Hazard on January 30, 2012

Headliner.fm is a platform for trading recommendations with other artists on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. You “buy” recommendations using a virtual currency called band bucks, which can be purchased outright for real money or earned by recommending other artists.

Creating a promotion is deceptively simple. You start by writing the recommendation and adding a link:

I say “deceptively” because I managed to botch my first one, to the tune of 48,043 band bucks. You’re supposed to put your link in the URL box and then click “shorten URL,” which appends a bit.ly link to the message. I wanted people to see where the link went, which makes it more likely to be clicked, so I didn’t shorten it.

My heart sank when I saw that my first recommender’s status update was missing the link. I immediately withdrew the promotion, which only removes it from the pool of promotions artists can accept. I still had to pay for every pending recommendation, even though some were scheduled weeks ahead!

The rest of the options are relatively straightforward. Choose your networks, genres of artists who can recommend you, and any particular artists you’d like to add. To restrict the promotion to a certain city (US only), start typing its name and hope it appears in the drop-down box. You can set the campaign to run for 3, 7, 14 or 30 days.

click to continue…

Why I Still Use Jango

Jango offers free Pandora-style internet radio. Type in an artist’s name and it generates a playlist of related songs. Jango Airplay lets artists buy their way into the recommendation engine, promising guaranteed airplay alongside your pick of big names. I’ve been running Jango campaigns pretty much continuously since the service launched in March of 2009. [...]

What Artists Should Know About ReverbNation’s Promote It

Running a Facebook ad campaign is confusing. You bid for ad placement, but the price you pay bears little relation to your bid. What’s the difference between reach and social reach, connections and clicks, CPC and CPM? More importantly, is there any way to tell how many people played, downloaded, and shared your song, or [...]

How I Got 96 Album Cover Designs for $145 (and why I’ll never do it again)

Quality graphic design is expensive. I paid $500 just to license the cover image for my last album, plus $600 for the rest of the design. That’s fine every couple of years, but now that I’m releasing songs individually, I need a cover design every month or two. I decided to give 99designs a try, [...]

Prescreen Your Future Fans with Twitter

Two months ago, I began implementing Ariel Hyatt and Carla Lynne Hall’s strategy to increase my Twitter following, as laid out in their book Musician’s Roadmap to Facebook and Twitter. The basic idea is to follow potential fans in the hope that they will follow back. I discovered that the more selective I am in choosing who [...]

A Mastering Engineer’s Guide to Final Mixdown

10 Ways to Trade a Song for an Email Address

I measure my success as a recording artist by the growth of my mailing list. The best way to get someone to subscribe is to offer something in return, and a great song is a powerful incentive. Here are ten techniques to negotiate that delicate exchange: 1. The classic squeeze page. You’ve probably stumbled onto [...]

2010: The Year in Passive Promotion

2010 was the best year yet for Color Theory. I released my eighth and best full-length album, The Sound, followed by my best EP, The Silence. More people bought and stole my music than ever before – both great things, as I explain in this short interview with Hypebot. Along the way, I shared my [...]

An Argument Against Fan Funding

Let’s be honest. You don’t need the money. Anyone can make a record for next to nothing these days. Almost any other hobby is more expensive: photography, mountain biking, even video gaming. When a teenager singing into a webcam gets exponentially more views on YouTube than your latest “professional” video, the answer isn’t more money. [...]