Mr Cooper is becoming famous...

... on Soundclick!

here's a pic of my message board, I just noticed the ad on top...

All I can say is best of luck.

Cool.

I just think the banner should read "Alex Cooper's 'Dream' CD Powered by Project 5".

have a good one
3Eo

$6 seems like it would be worth a roll of the dice.

eric

unless your really well known, I think most people that try and sell a cd, end up selling most of their copies to friends, with a few exceptions. I know SGX sold quite a bit, but he markets his stuff around. you cant expect anyone from soundclick to really buy one...as soundclick seems geared more towards musicians...and not listeners :)

of course...there is the possibility that you stuff (not aimed at you ATS) sucks @ss...and you should stop making music, and go kill yourself....

then...maybe.....since your dead, you will sell more copies....lol

well it wasn;t worth it because I didn't sell any cds from it. It was worth a shot though for $6. I only sold a few cds as preorders but I would guess more than most people do :)

i found this set of statements confusing and possibly contradictory

1) I didn't sell any cds from it (it being th ead)

2) I only sold a few preorders
maybe that means a few preorders were sold, but not through the ad?

The ad ran as a preorder and and when the cd was released -- It worked for th epreorder, but not for the release?


anyway without the sort of myspace presence and fanbase that sgx has built up, it's difficult to get a lot of sales
and mostly it's to people you know already online -- esp initially -- as time has gone on I've made a few sales to people completely unknown to me (and I think blipp has had similar experience)

I do think that :10: makes the sort of music that would have much greater potential for sales than say what I do, but how that marketing would happen I don't know. I have no feel at all for how popular the sort of music ATS makes might be.
I'm in the position now if I make a few more sales that CDBabay will ask for 10 more copies and if I fulfilled that request, I'd definitely never make back that investment in materials and ink, since it's very unlikely those copies would sell. My market is tapped.

Sean... your work is becoming a lot more "listenable"... not in a negative way, but I mean that it's some stuff that those who like trip hop would probably like... and there are a lot of them... I mean, I don't see someone who likes Massive attack or portishead say that he doesn't like what you do...

as for the fan base and all... just send your album to ninja tunes, they do have a huge fan base LOL!

Hi John,

Welcome back, hope your illness is behind you.

Don't know if you think this is worth considering kunaki

ORIGINAL: blipp

This is quite topical for me as i opened up my emails this morning to find i'd sold another Tilt CD to someone in france i did'nt know. Problem now is that CD Baby have run out of my cd and i did'nt really want to fork out the money to send them some more (costs a bit from the UK), plus the fact i've gotta make them first and i'm just not in the mood at the moment tbh. I'll have to force myself to though i think or i would have wasted the setup costs. Hav'nt sold a great ammount (21 so far) cause i don't promote it. It's more of a fun thing really.

21 is really good, I haven't sold that many yet. I will be setup on cdbaby soon and then will stop selling them myself. I am happy to say I really didn't know but two people who actually bought my CD. It is a real compliment and feels great when you sell a CD to someone you never even met.

I see nothing wrong with trying to market your music myself but I guess I can see why some people don't want to bother. It does take time sometime to answer all the emails and stay in touch with a ton of people etc etc. I was going to go on myspace but I really don't want to spend the time trying to build up any kind of fan base there. I have to do very little at soundclick and I get a good number of lisetens but yeah hardly anyone buys anything on there. I sold about 20 singles all together. I just started to try to sell them again.

It's not like I am in it for the money though. I spent about 300 to get my songs mastered, 275 to get 100 printed and 100 on the artwork. And I will most liekly never make that back unless a miracle happens not to mention the literally thousands I have spent on music software but I woldn't do it if it wasn't worth it to me.

I think the marketing and interactions with other musicians part is fun for me or I wouldn't do that either. I even enjoy the drama I think when someone rips me apart

ORIGINAL: badbib

hey Alex... you didn't mention the price of acapelas!

but yeah... it's all about having fun doing what you do... and if you trust in your material, you should really leave soundclick and send it to some small or less small labels... it could be sweet.

I don't know if they're interested in that kind of music, but if so, and if the mix is good, then you could get some support.

I'm happy with the way things are now.

I've done ok for myself promoting my tunes all on the internet. Some things I think have worked out for me:

- I've had a website that isn't some soundclick or mp3.com generic thing where people can find my stuff for about 4 years. It is an easy to remember URL so if someone forgets about me for a year, whenever they do remember me and want to find me, they know exactly where. I update my site often with just random news about things, so those bored people with nothing to do on the web except check news on lots of different sites, expect a little something new so they keep coming back and DON'T FORGET about me. I add a new free track ever month and a half or so. You need to have a strong base on the web that's got plenty of content - and not just music content - news and descriptions of your songs are good too. You need to show that you have personality a bit I think so the person who might buy your tunes feels like he is "tipping" somebody who is real and cool, not just feeding some money into some faceless soundclick site. The key is to make sure people DON"T FORGET and have interest in coming back to check on you often. If you can't build a site, get a blog system template and use that. It's not that tough.

- You need to get your tunes INTO other things that will reach different audiences. I've got my tracks in a bunch of popular flash games, some game remixes on ocremix.org, kids like to make lame anime music videos with my music and post them on youtube, I made that interactive flash remixer game with my song and got it posted on newgrounds and some interactive art sites, etc. Make sure whoever uses your stuff links back to your site! Don't just pimp your music on music production forums...everybody is saving money for more music software! Get your music in weird places. I have some tunes in a Malaysian music PC game and have gotten some instant messages from Malaysians about my music. Crazy! Apparently Paypal is blocked there so they can't buy my stuff off my site though! Drat.

-Free tunes - How often will you buy some music after hearing 30 second clips? Hardly ever, in my case. Especially from some nobody without any type of reputation that you know of. I put my url in the album field of all the mp3's I have available. I'm making sure that NO ONE FORGETS where they can come back and find more music. Plus, people send mp3's to friends all the time, so then their friends will know where to get more if they weren't even told. My music spreads like a virus muahhaahah. My CD's sell pretty well and usually about 3/4 of the material can be found for free on my site anyways. People who buy from independent musicians do it a lot of the time because they like to support the musician that's given them some good tracks, not necessarily for the music (I know this because I surveyed my listeners!).

- Selling singles (soundclick, iTunes, etc) is bad for business I think. When the user has to click once for each track he wants to spend a dollar or whatever on, that feels like he is spending more money. This will make them buy only a few tracks instead of all 12 or however many are on the album. I sell downloads off my site and it is always only FULL albums. Don't give them a choice. It's all or none, and the buyer definitely wants some, so make sure they pay ALL :).

- If you think you're not going to sell more than 50 ish CD's, I think you should stick with Cafepress to make and sell your discs. I did some rough math a while back, and the costs of paying someone to print (or even printing your own), plus shipping, plus cdbaby setup, etc makes it much more efficient (not to mention way less time consuming!) to just get cafepress to do it. They do a pretty good job too.


I think the keys are: Good website updated often, plenty of free (full) samples, plenty of personality, and spreading your music.

I do spend plenty of time maintaining and promoting myself, but I'm not just doing this for the money - it also makes me very happy to get as many listeners as I can (another reason why I love having the majority of my material free). My site gets about 40 gb of mp3 traffic a month, so that's pretty rad that that many people hear my stuff. Though the percentage of those buying might be a bit sad if you think about it for a bit.....

This was a bit longwinded, but this business stuff I actually enjoy thinking about. Hope that gives some people some ideas. I know so many great artists who could be quite popular if they just did a few simple things to market themselves.