How do we market our new album? Part 3

Marketing an album on a budget of doodley-squat is interesting. The album was released two days ago and you can check back on the previous couple of posts for the story so far:

Part 2

Part 1

There’s been a healthy initial surge of downloads and sales from Bandcamp. We quickly made enough to cover the cost of paying our aggregator, Tunecore, to place the album in all the main download stores, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, eMusic, Napster, Nokia etc.

Tunecore requires 16 bit WAV files as masters, so there was a process of reformatting all the tunes down to that quality from the original 24 bit WAV masters. Mildly annoying but you’d think that would mean it would be a shorter process to upload them all. Well, maybe it was but it didn’t seem like it!

iTunes takes less than 24 hours to go live but the others can take days or weeks, so only iTunes has shown up so far. They’re charging £7.90. There is no price choice with iTunes.

My Facebook advert has been showing very few clicks being made so I changed some parameters (it’s easy to do so) and we’ll see if that ups the traffic a bit. I also created a post on our Facebook page with a subtly-worded poll question in it:

I also messaged my most likely friends. I found that I can’t send a collective message to ‘fans’ from the band page, though, which is silly.

Sales from Bandcamp have been interesting. Most of those that have paid have chosen to pay $1 or $2 but some have paid $10 or $15. We are thankful to all those who choose to pay and we are also happy to give the album free to those who don’t want to, or can’t, pay. So far, we’ve used all the incoming funds just to pay for more hosting etc but that’s great!

Next report soon.