Online Music Sales Guide

Understanding how online marketing works is a challenge. One of the biggest hurdles is accepting how commercialized and business-oriented everything seems. You may feel the music you created and are passionate about is overlooked, since there are so many other artists constantly competing, but there are ways to solve this problem.. I’m eager to help build a bridge to bring independent artists into a profitable online music world.

I want you to know that it is entirely possible to be profitable online, but it's going to feel like pushing a loaded cart uphill for a while. We want to drive the car, but we don't even have wheels yet. I get that a general lack of viewers or listeners can be disheartening at times. You've probably spent years, or decades, of your life creating incredible albums, pouring tirelessly over liner notes, and artwork; things seemed to be working until the world changed.

Try to aim BIG, and encourage every friend you have to join and embrace this world of online music. I want your ideas. I would love to see the artists who inspired me as a child to regain popularity and grow in recognition. Future generations should have access to the songs, stories and life lessons that shaped our community. I want to keep learning about what makes you uniquely different and amazing. Ideally, our family of devoted musicians and educators will generate enough online sales to keep doing what they do best: create magic. We can make this happen if we work together, and support each other!

Here's what I need you to do if you want to help. It’s time to adopt a new mantra and be comfortable using these words: "Please subscribe or follow"

Glossary (Driver’s Test)

There's no avoiding the fact that a bit of re-education is key, so below you will find, essentially, the written portion of our ‘drivers test’ for online music sales.

Followers*

On the surface this is pitched as a way to organize the music we want accessible. Behind the curtain all the big services (spotify, youtube, facebook, itunes) track followers and use the music they listen to as suggestions to other listeners.

Streams

These are counted in Spotify when a song is streamed for over 30 seconds.

Listener 

These are unique users who stream your songs during the time period specified. If someone plays your music multiple times in the displayed time period, they only get counted once.

Influencer

When you follow, or subscribe, to a service or artist you become an influencer. From that point on everything you listen, or watch, gets linked to that person you supported. Regular users will be subjected to the things that followers gave priority. So if you follow two or more artists, it is becomes more likely that someone listening to any of those artists will end up being served a song, or video, from one of those others the influencer has followed.

Playlists

Playlists are a great way to organize music you like, but they are also essential to marketing music online. A song shared between more than one playlist creates some cryptic map for the music program to serve users random music.

Discover Playlists

I'm using this to describe the playlists people see when they load up the application. If you start Spotify you will be greeted by a list of categories and playlists. These are like a gold mine for attracting new listeners. The only way to get there is to get noticed, and that means repeating that mantra "Please subscribe or follow" until it happens.

Radio Station

These are no longer radio waves. This term applies to playlists created by a magician behind the scenes. The songs played on the radio stations are determined by some combination of followers, playlists, streams, and listeners. The most likely place anyone gets the majority of plays seems to be radio stations.


* Followers and subscribers are the same thing.

Making the big bucks!

Every service has a different way of paying the artist. Understanding these differences is the key to successful marketing, or supporting artists.
Facebook

"To be eligible for all monetization features, this means having an established presence for at least 90 days."

YouTube

"To gain access to ad breaks, this also includes maintaining a sufficient follower base, indicated by your Facebook friends or followers."

Spotify

Just get your music on there and you're ready to start making .003 cents a stream. Sounds tough, but the market is over 160 million according to spotify. I have no idea how many parents are a part of that figure, but it's got to a number well into the millions. Eventually I may even find data to help us understand how many people there are out there.

Wrap Up

I'm here to help, to answer questions, and to discuss how we can work together as a team to market your music.

Please subscribe, and follow, and also on twitter