Selling MP3s

Drexel’s Student-Run Record Label Reshaping Music Business Education

Mar 15th, 2008 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: CD Releases, Selling CDs and Selling MP3s

Welcome to spinme.com, where we help working musicians make more money making music. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or our weekly newsletter. Thanks for visiting!When I was in school — and I did have to walk uphill in the snow to get to class, so get [...]



Download “Falling Slowly” from the Once Soundtrack for Free

Feb 26th, 2008 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Indie Music Resources and Selling MP3s

This week’s sponsor:

Seems like everyone’s on the free bandwagon this week. I don’t know if this was on the site before the Oscar win, but you can download a copy of “Falling Slowly” in MP3 with no DRM, right from the Fox Searchlight website.
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Bum Rush the Charts Day

Mar 22nd, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Selling MP3s

Via Bob, I learned about this interesting attempt to game the downloadable singles chart, the way that authors often do at Amazon.com. By coordinating a whole lot of purchases through iTunes, the organizers hope to land a podsafe single by a band that has been dumped from two major label contracts onto the charts.
Here’s what [...]



The Orchard Teams with Last.fm

Mar 14th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Selling MP3s

Independent media distributor The Orchard has teamed up with social music service Last.fm to make its catalog of over one million tracks available to the service’s users. If you haven’t used Last.fm, you should definitely check it out. While it’s not for everyone, it’s a neat tool that suggests songs you might like based on [...]



Quit Yer iTunes Bellyaching

Mar 13th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Selling MP3s

If I see anything else that tries to frame the front of the iTunes Store as a potential scandal, I’m gonna hurl. There’s nothing wrong with iTunes, as a content aggregator, choosing how to allocate its promotional inventory.
Brick-and-mortar stores charge hefty fees to get record company product on endcaps. Many analysts believe that pay-for-placement endcap [...]



Listeners Use Your Music in Context — How You Can Spread Your Own Music Using iMixes

Sep 12th, 2006 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Booking More Gigs, Growing Your Audience and Selling MP3s

Listen to this great description of how one listener uses and enjoys iMix selections from the Apple iTunes Music Store. People in America used to use radio and mixtapes for that kind of experience, but now they turn to other listeners online.
So here’s one suggestion to boost sales of your music while growing your audience.
Think [...]



It’s Easy to Sell a Million CDs

Sep 5th, 2006 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Selling MP3s

…and so very difficult to sell one thousand.

Grant Robertson’s on fire over at the Digital Music Weblog, and he’s totally right about the pricing of online downloads. Fifteen years ago, if you had to get your hands on a rare/obscure/import disc, you had to pay more. When I moved back to Ithaca, New York after [...]



Juliana Hatfield Lets Fans Run a Tab

Sep 5th, 2006 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Selling MP3s

She’s launching an honor system and requesting that, in exchange for the downloadable, DRM-free MP3s she’s posting to the site, that fans send in at least 50 cents for each copy they like/keep.
[ via The Digital Music Weblog ]
Technorati Tags: music+business, Juliana+Hatfield
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What’s the Real Value of a Song? Free Downloads and Sponsored MP3s.

Aug 29th, 2006 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Selling MP3s

For years, I have written and lectured about how your songs (as downloadable MP3s) are your very best promotional vehicle. They contain value themselves, but making the process of getting them into your fans’ iPods and CD changers is where you can trade a tremendous amount of value for the personal information and the attention [...]



SellaBand: Fans Pay for Your Recording Sessions

Aug 16th, 2006 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Recording, Selling CDs and Selling MP3s

Over the last few years, I’ve been talking to clients and members about how to get a core group of your fans to fund your recording sessions by selling pre-order copies and letting folks purchase “executive producer” credits on discs. We’ve even had folks use neat little PayPal donation meters to track their progress.
Today, I [...]