moving the needle - the needle moves (barely)

Moving the needle

Sometimes it is very difficult to know what kind of promotion works and what doesn’t. In the end word of mouth is everything. I have done very little to promote Spray recently, yet they continue to sell a lot of stuff.

Other times I do try to push releases a lot. I am ramping up pushing the new Empire State Human CD for example. So far I have
1. Mailed out Cds to a number of goth/electro websites (sideline, Regen, Outburn, etc.)
2. Added a track to Jango.com (only a few plays so far)
3. Gotten two other blogs who appear on the Hypem list to add remixes of “Melancholic Afro” (not sure they have actually added them yet, but when they do I will add a link)
4. Purchased a banner ad on Sideline

I am really trying to get blogs to add a remix of Melancholic Afro as a free download – this way people can hear the music but it doesn’t necessarily involve giving away an album track.

We’ll have to see if I can move the needle on Audio gothic

I have gotten two small moves on other releases

1. Smile.dk – so far as of April 6 Amazon has sold more copies of their Cd than all of last month (March). Part of this may be people getting excited about the Sarucon event next weekend (April 10-12). Smile.dk plays two nights there, up to 10,000 people are expected to attend the Anime convention. So I am hoping next weekend and next week to see a big bump.

But also I purchased 2500 plays on Jango for the Smile.dk song “Doki Doki.” So far they have played it 188 times and 51 people have “liked” it, which means it gets added to Jango’s regular rotation. I suspect that a few people on Jango were Smile fans and maybe not aware of the album so this is why Amazon got such a big hit, why the needle moved for Amazon sales.

2. More puzzling is Cotton & Gin. In the past week they have sold 3 copies of the song “Intergalactic Life” on iTunes. Not much, no, but it’s the first thing they’ve sold after being out for a couple of months. With Cotton & Gin we tried something different. We gave away both the EP and the single on their blog, in fact I am pretty sure almost all of those tracks are still up, for free. We also made three videos. The first of which (see below) got some traction because people were curious about the use of old Ub Iwerks animation. A second video, for Good Things, got featured on the LArgeweekend blog, but that did not get much of a bump.



The video for Intergalactic Life (see below) got 7 hits, pretty sure most of those were me checking to make sure it played well on YouTube.



Then last night I get an email from youtube saying a comment had been made on the video. So I went there and , lo, all-of-a-sudden there are 21 plays.

So my question is what moved the needle? I guess randomly 14 people could have clicked on the video but not sure 3 random people would have purchased the track from iTunes within 4 days, not for song that is not getting any play anywhere (except Youtube now).

I have googled the song to see if a blog featured it, but no luck.

Funny, and frustrating. How do I make it happen again, how to I make sure that others can use the same way to hear the music when I don’t know how they heard it to begin with?