Touching up

The company I used to work for contacted me a few days ago and asked if I could do a small job for them. Money is never a bad thing for a starving musician, so I agreed. But now the job is done and today I’m re-recording some stuff. There were a few things in the songs that are already available on this site that I wasn’t quite happy with. Nothing huge, just some details here and there, a guitar part being slightly off, a short section that wasn’t quite in tune, stuff like that. So today I’m retouching those things and making sure everything is good.

When that is done, I’m going to record the last song for my collection to put it online. I think it’s a bit inaccurate to call it an “album”, since it’s all mp3 files and not an actual CD, so I’m just calling it a “collection” instead. Anyway, once the last song is done, I’m going to really start pushing with the marketing. I’m going to upload the collection on Last.fm, iTunes, and any other online music store I can find. I’m going to try and make some kind of music video and put it on YouTube as well. My songs are still going to be free to download here on my site, but I’m going to put them up for sale in the music stores as well.

I read a book called Long Tail by Chris Anderson a while ago. It’s an interesting book, I recommend reading it if you’re a musician like me. The term “Long Tail” is about online stores and the shape of the sales curve. To put it briefly, a regular store like your local CD shop, usually only carries a couple of thousand CDs at the time. They have to pay rent and salaries, etc. so for them it’s not profitable to keep CDs that don’t sell enough to pay for their shelf space and then some. Online stores don’t have that problem, since a domain and the server space cost way less than a physical store, so they can keep millions of albums in their catalogs.

Now, while the top 10 selling albums sell loads and loads of copies, the 1000th album on the list sells way less than the top 10. The curve drops quite rapidly. The 10 000th album sells even less, the curve drops even lower. But the interesting thing is that no matter how far down the list you go, the curve never actually drops down to zero – it just levels out more and more and hovers around a couple of copies a month. This is the long tail effect, and it’s pretty cool. No matter how many albums you put on the list, every single one of them gets bought at least once in a while.

For a guy like me that’s good news, because it means that if I write some decent music and put it up for sale with the big music stores, my music will get bought at least a couple of times a month. Of course, the music store will grab a chunk of the profit, so I’m not going to be making any big amounts of money with this, but it will be a couple of bucks every now and then. And the more songs I put up, the more money I will eventually earn. And if I manage to write some music that is actually good and becomes popular, I will of course make more money. But more importantly – for every person that actually buys one of my songs, there will be hundreds of people who hear it. Even if they don’t like it that much, it’s publicity for me.