Some Numbers...

As promised, here’s some initial numbers for Resistor, the EP I put out on Bandcamp last week. (If you’re just joining us, scroll back a couple posts for the full skinny.)

Plays

Bandcamp has a fairly extensive stats system, and shows you the difference between plays on the site and plays via an embedded player, and also shows you how many people played the whole song versus people that just played part of the song. I personally don’t think that latter information is useful, unless the partial plays far outweigh the normal plays. In this case, they do not, so we’ll just lump ’em all together.

The long and short of it is that I got 7,255 individual song plays. This is naturally heavily weighted towards the front of the album, with Metatrak alone getting roughly 40% of all plays. This isn’t surprising in the least, as you all do what I do, which is listen to the first 10 seconds of the first song, and make a snap judgment on whether to listen to more. The embedded plays (plays from either here, CDM, and Matrixsynth, the only sites that embedded the player to the best of my knowledge) accounted for almost exactly half of all plays.

Sales

In 10 days, I received a total of 148 paid downloads, for a total of US$655.17. This works out to an average of US$4.42 per download. As a pay-what-you-want album, this bit is significant, I think. The first and second days, the vast majority of the payments were US$5.00. For the most part, anyone that contributed more, I probably knew them, either as long-time fans of my oeuvre or people I talk with often. The average has gone down significantly in the last couple days, as have the purchases in general, but right now, we’re at US$0.09 per play when you put everything together. This is a very high number by any metric you could care to name, and in that regard I count the Bandcamp experience as an absolutely smashing success.

I think it’s worth mentioning a couple of things at this point:

My third SMG album, Burn, sold 64,000 copies its first year of sales, and is now up in the quarter million range, according to Soundscan. The amount of actual cash money I received in artist royalties from that? US$0.00. So, in that respect, Resistor is a far more successful record.

The actual cost of making the EP is tougher to pin down. It’s pointless to figure in the cost of the gear itself (roughly US$28,000 at current values) as I didn’t buy it expressly for making this collection of songs. I also don’t value my time in dollars earned, but rather in accomplishment. Time that doesn’t result in accomplishment (that I can point to and say “see, I made this!”) is time ill spent, and thus a cost, in my stilted worldview. But since the time spent on this resulted in the accomplishment of the release, it is at parity in this particular case.

If I was to relate these figures to the release of an actual CD, like we would have done as recently as three years ago, this would be an incredibly dismal failure, I wouldn’t lie to you. But the obverse is that my wife and I didn’t have to fight over cover art and bios for a couple weeks, we didn’t have the massive front-loaded costs of the pressing, and we didn’t have to package hundreds to thousands of CDs and go wait in line at the post office several times a day for a week.

I purposefully did essentially no promotion aside from my post here, Twitter, and asking Matrix to put up a blurb. Peter Kirn put up a nice post on CDM of his own volition, and there are some various other mentions here and there, as well.

Which brings us to the next phase. Now that sales are essentially idling, I’m able to do individual promotions and see the direct effect, and I’m looking for some suggestions and ideas in that regard. What would be the proper course of action at this juncture? We have a little money we can spend on advertising, but I’d rather keep it in the free realm, for obvious reasons.