Re: Bandcamp "let fan name price"

[mark francombe <mark@markfrancombe.com>]

Although this might be true of an upcoming unknown artist (I hereby subscribe to Pers philosophy that no artist should sell themselves short) there is no doubt in my mind that product does and has had a huge impact to play on marketing successes in the past.

CERTAINLY in the old school record buying world that I fondly remember.

As a for instance. I am personally mentioned twice in the "Big book of British Hit singles". To be that you must have had a single at least in the top ten selling record for one week in the UK charts. Both of there achieve that by, what I would call a "Marketing Cheat". By no doubt a music biz professional would call it business as usual.

So Cranes single "Jewel" came out as a 7 inch single. We made 3 versions
Original version
Radio edit version (shorter and vocals unfeasably loud)
Remix (by Robert Smith of the Cure)

Each single had unique packaging and different B-sides.

ONE of the versions (the original) also came with a slightly empty box (designed to fit all three singles)
An heres the point, The single cost 99p, hat was 1pound 51p cheaper than a regular single

I wager that no one bought 1 copy. Ever!

Every sale gave us 3 sells on the chart listing...
Now this is NOT what we were talking about here of course, how to increase sales for our humble looping projects. That I cant answer, as I sell exactly NIL of my records, and put a very cheap price on my music at Bandcamp. With some albums offered for free, but I am NOT a professional, at least Not in THAT business, but in TV scoring and film music, I am a professional, so I mainly sell my music in meeting rooms, not on the internet.

I don't think there IS a sure fire way to succeed nowadays, not like the KLF expounded in their book The Manual (If someone hasn't read this amazing funny and clever tome, knock me up offline I have a PDF)

But there one thing for sure, no one gets anywhere NOW-adays without shit loads of hard-work, talent and skill. Thats better than before, when it was often money and /or corruption and/or luck that determined success.

No more Milly Vanilli!

Mark

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Daniel Thomas <danielthomas4@mac.com> wrote:

In my experience, robust sales are not so much about price - sales growth proportional to marketing muscle.
And, similar to Per's point--  Lower prices are at crossed purposes with growing market buzz in many cases as they indicate a less than product value.

How to build Marketing Muscle without a deep pocket label/distributor?  Thats a thread I want to see.

Daniel

On Aug 11, 2011, at 5:42 AM, Michael Peters wrote:

> My Bandcamp albums aren't selling very well. I know I'm not gigging a lot
> and very few people (outside of this livelooping community) are aware of my
> music ... but maybe the albums are also too expensive (10 Euros mostly) now
> that people are used to getting tons of stuff for free. Has anyone tried the
> "let fan name price" feature for a while and has it made a difference?
>
> -Michael
>

-- 
Mark Francombe

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