Monthly Archives: January 2006
Band sells 120,000 copies of album thanks to online downloading.
The Arctic monkeys sell 120,000 copies of their first album. It is the fastest selling album in britain thanks to their internet downloading savyness. They promoted the sites that illegally played their music and they gave out demo copies which spread on the internet that gained interest.
Take that RIAA.
Neither a god nor a devil…
I’m doing some research for my upcoming talk at Northern Voice on the intersection of technology and music, and I came across this great article in the New Yorker. The standout quote for me was:
“In the early years of the century, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, and Percy Grainger used phonographs to preserve the voices of elderly folksingers whose timeless ways were being stamped out by the advance of modern life. And what was helping to stamp them out? The phonograph, with its international hit tunes and standardized popular dances.”
Which brings me to another great quote from German music critic Hans Stuckenschmidt, regarding the advent of the phonograph:
“The machine is neither a god nor a devil.”
When I look at my email inbox though, I know the machine is a devil…
CD Baby
So I have recently put my band Greenroom’s CD up for sale on CD Baby. For those that don’t know, CD Baby is an online service that lets musicians sell their music online. They deal with the hassle of shipping and keeping track of orders and just send you a nice cheque whenever you manage to sell a few. They also have a bunch of digital distributors signed up (such as iTunes) that you can optionally sell your music through.
So far, I have been really impressed with their service and I love the “built by musicians, for musicians” vibe on everything from the welcome email to your account balance.
It also seems like the site itself generates quite a bit of traffic, which isn’t surprising considering it’s the largest online retailer of independent music. We have already sold a few CD’s, despite the fact that I have never linked to our CDBaby page until now!…
So thanks to the coding and business genius of Derek Sivers, I am now living proof of the existence of the Long Tail.
Now I just have to get our new Drupal site live and record a new album.