Free Soundtracks – Getting Your Music Into The Movies

If history has influence on current events, musicians can rest assured that during difficult economic times, people will seek out entertainment to take their minds off of their troubles. Movies and Music are at the top of that list, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see an increase in awareness thanks to a combination of the economy, Guitar Hero, Rockband and the always popular American Idol (or insert your country HERE Idol).

While the former music industry crumbles into a slow, self-inflicted suicide stabbing of itself, there is an opportunity for independent musicians/bands to form alliances with independent filmmakers. Recently, I read a story in TechDirt about a independent movie production, for a movie called The Graduates, that was going to heed SEC Bad Boy Mark Cuban’s suggestion of giving away soundtracks to movie goers.  Being a big fan of both independent movies and indie music (not to mention Mark Cuban), I was really intrigued by the idea of attempting to give away 1,000,000 soundtracks to an independent movie.  So I contacted executive producer of The Graduates, Ryan Gielen, for an interview to better understand this process and how it might benefit both independent musicians and movies in the future.

SMMuG: For the bands and musicians who are not familiar with the movie making process, how do Executive Producers find music for their films?  Is there a directory, website, association or service that helps movie makers find specific types of music?

Ryan: Many films have music supervisors who seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of music. They’re like a Cinematographer in a lot of ways- they interpret the story and the tone and the textures and pick out music that expresses those things. On The Graduates we asked bands I already knew and loved, and we put out a call on several websites and blogs for music submissions. The soundtrack is a mix of both.

All told, Matt (my producer/brother) and I received about 10,000 song submissions and whittled that down to 24 songs. I didn’t particularly care where or who the music came from, I just wanted to find the perfect song for a particular scene. There are so many incredible bands looking for exposure that it wasn’t difficult to find those songs.

Ryan Gielen

SMMuG: It’s clear that your Free Soundtrack promotion would be beneficial to the movie, but what are the specific benefits that musicians would receive by participating in your project?

SMMuG: There are some good examples of strong soundtracks drawing attention to a movie, but do you seek out independent bands that have large followings in order benefit from their fan base?  If so, how did you determine what kind of following each band might have?

Ryan: For The Graduates, I never looked at the bands’ followings, because the soundtrack is not the product. The film is the product, so I wanted songs that made the film stronger. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the MySpace friends or whatever bands use to determine their fan base because I’m not a promoter or a booker, I was just looking for pieces that would help this scene or that scene.

SMMuG: What are your plans for marketing and promoting this very unique offer in the markets where your movie will be screened?  Do have street teams or what local promotional efforts are you using to raise the awareness for your film?  Are any of the bands involved in your promotional efforts?  Maybe brief concerts before or after the screening?

Ryan: When our release schedule is in place we’ll work with the bands to schedule the kinds of events you’re describing, but in the meantime we’re doing tons of grassroots outreach- emails, phone calls, blog articles. When we get close to screenings we’ll have our street teams in place along with articles and other local coverage. We’ve gotten pretty good at this- we’ve had 7 or 8 standing room only festival and sneak preview screenings in five different states. I hope we can carry that over into the release, I know we’re working our asses off to make that happen!

SMMuG: Frequently, I’ll purchase soundtracks to movies prior to actually seeing the movie – Mark Mothersbaugh’s musical influence with Wes Anderson movies are a prime example.  Watching the movie, the familiar soundtrack increases my appreciation of the movie.  Is there any discussion about getting ticket sales up front so that the soundtrack could be in possession of the movie goers prior to the screening?

Ryan: We hope the free soundtrack will have this effect. We’re giving away the soundtrack in order to generate buzz, sure, but most importantly we want people to see the quality and entertainment value of the film. We’re not just competing against $250,000 movies, we’re competing against all movies, so how does a little tiny indie like us get attention, and show off the goods? We think this is a start.

Plushgun

Plushgun is a great example. Dan Ingala was making music in his room, but he started putting it out there and playing a little in Brooklyn where he had a dedicated following, and then he let a small little web tv show use his song “Just Impolite.” They put the song in a video on the web, it got hot because it’s a great song and people could easily pass it around, I stumble on it and loved it and put it in the film. Around that time he gets invited to SXSW, later gets signed by Tommy Boy, and now he’s releasing his first full album in two weeks, and “Just Impolite” is featured in a long, critical sequence in The Graduates. But it all started with him making his great music available online for people to pass around.

Regarding directors- IMDb.com is a great place to start (the Internet Movie Database). If you pay $100 per year you can join IMDb Pro, which has contact information and production information for most people in film. Filmmakers update the status of their project and you can search for projects “in development” or “in production” or “in post production.” I would contact every single one of those filmmakers with a link to your myspace or iTunes pages and mention two songs they might dig. Make a quick mention of why the songs are good for the film: “saw this is a family drama, you might dig this acoustic track.” If you don’t want to pay the $100, chances are you have a friend or acquaintance who has IMDb Pro, I’m sure they’ll let you hop on for a good cause.

This is also why it’s smart to produce your own music videos. If you post a job on Mandy.com looking for a Director, and you do three or four videos a year, after three years you have ten to twelve young directors who know and like you and your music. Chances are these guys are going to try and make another short or feature at some point, and your music will end up in the score.

I would also put all these videos, even if it’s just concert footage, on Youtube and Blip.tv. Blip is amazing because it lets you submit to all online video sites with one click, including podcasting on iTunes. If your band recorded every concert on camera and with good audio through the soundboard, and uploaded that as a podcast to iTunes and other video sites, you would be pretty groundbreaking. And the only investment is a $500 HD camera and a couple cables to connect your laptop to the soundboard.

I think tracking down filmmakers is a lot like tracking down your audience- if you don’t put content out into the world, nobody’s going to find you… I think this is attributed to Cory Doctorow, but I completely agree: “The greatest threat to an artist is obscurity, not piracy.” There’s a reason The Dead let people tape their shows. They wanted people to hear them whether you could make the show or not. The bottom line is we all want that great distribution or record deal, but the reality is that it probably won’t happen. So artists really can’t afford to sit on their art, you have to put it out there.

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Keyword: SMMUG

Beyond providing us with some great direction, inspiration and information, Ryan Gielen has also promised to give 100 SMMuG readers the full, 24 track soundtrack to The Graduates!  Visit the Graduates website. put the digital soundtrack in your cart and use the following code at check-out to get the whole thing for FREE: SMMUG.  Beyond getting the soundtrack for free, you’ll also be registering for an almost monthly SMMuG newsletter, from yours truly.

-pjc

Make Your Next Music Video for Just $3 – Animoto

In case you hadn’t noticed, online video is BIG deal these days.  Acorrding to this story posted in September 2008, by the CEO and Co-Founder of YouTube, the YouTube service alone receives 13 hours of video submission every MINUTE.   When I was doing some research for keywords on Google last week I noticed that the term “music video” was search 13.6 million times during the month of December. That was more that twice the average volume leading up to that month!

So if twice as many people are looking for music videos online where is yours?

Lucky for you, my broke but artistic friend, I have answer.  We just discovered Animoto this week and it’s actually pretty slick. You can try a 30 second clip for free, or you buy a credit for one song for $3 or, if you REALLY like it, you can get an all access pass for $30 for a year (which includes hosting). While this might be a tad more expensive than something like Blip.tv, there is a great feature, ideal for music videos.

After feeding your music track and a bunch of photos to Animoto, it looks at the sound of your music and creates a unique mix of your photos in time to your music, complete with effects! Where else can you take some still pix, your music and $3 and get a hosted video?  Nowhere – but Animoto.

Please give it a shot and then let us know what you think below. Better still, post the URLs to your new Animoto made videos!

-pjc

ChromeWaves Delivers a Consistently Great Music Review Ride

Since late 2002, Frank Yang, the owner/operator/writer for the music review weblog called ChromeWaves has turned his passion for music into a “second full-time job”. Beyond writing really informative music reviews, Frank shares news and links to MP3’s for most of the bands featured.

His own stats link indicates that he receives about 1,600 visitor each day, which puts him the top 25 music blog websites, according to Hype Machine.  ChromeWaves is a part of the BlogAds advertising networks, so if you have the cash to spare, be sure and include this website in your a la carte order.  According to Alexa, half the traffic for this Canadian blogger is coming from outside the US.  QuantCast seems to put the volume of US readers at only about a quarter of total traffic (~10k U.S. Visitors per month).  While some might see this as a disadvantage, I think this global diversity is an amazing way for ANY band, regardless of geography, to be seen by the world at large.  Technorati gives this music blog an Authority Rank of 281, which would likely put Frank in the Top 40 of all music review blogs that Technorati monitors. The Alexa traffic ranking for the site, over the past three months has it at 184k, an impressive score for ANY website. And according to Google, there are over 28,000 websites linking to ChromeWaves.net.

What’s unquestionable is Mr. Yang’s amazing dedication to bringing great music to light for so many years, and making ChromeWaves (a name taken from a song from one of his favorite bands, Ride) an important consideration for bands of many kinds.  Recent reviews this month included; Land of Talk, Zeroes, Friendly Fires, Cut Off Your Hands, Woodpigeon, Jealous Girlfriends, Sky Larkin, Emmy The Great, Ida Maria and more.  What I love about this blog is that Frank infuses news, tour dates, video links and mp3 files within his almost daily postings.  Really great stuff.

If this sounds like a man you want to make contact with, please do NOT send him MP3 attachments.  A simple email with a link to your MySpace/Facebook or website URL will suffice.  Email your message with link to submissions at chrome waves dot net.  I’m not including a direct email link, because he didn’t and I don’t want to be responsible for spamming this already very busy man.

-pjc

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Your comments below are HIGHLY appreciated, but please be sure to include a URL to your website or social network page.  Any Comments submitted without a connection to a legitimate website or page will not be approved.  And spammers and sploggers can suck my cancerous nut – wherever in hell that might be.

Paste Magazine Music Samplers Go Digital

When I first discovered Paste magazine, I thought that someone finally got it right.  For years I had pissed and moaned about how music magazines were missing the boat – why just READ about music, why not actually share the MUSIC? So I held my first issue of Paste with the same excitement that I held issue number one of Spin, issue number one of Wired and issue number one of Mondo 2000; THEY GET ME. But as usual, it doesn’t take too long before those good things come to an end.  Usually right after I subscribe, the magazine changes policy in an cost-cutting effort.

Paste was amazing in the early days because they provided both a music sampler CD and a video sampler DVD in the same issue.  The CD would almost always contain a few jems each month and the DVD would focus on music videos, live performances, movie trailers, some occasional shorts and usually a sponsor or two.  Where could you get more for a$5 investment beyond a CD, a DVD and a great read? Actually it was even cheaper when subscribing, so that’s exactly what I did. Just a few issues later, I got the notice that they were axing the DVD sampler. And now, a couple years later, the February 2009 issue will be the last newsstand issue with a CD sampler.

According to page 32 of that issue, Paste claims they ship more than 2,000,000 CDs each year. They surveyed their subscribers and discovered that most are ripping the CD to digital and tossing the disc. Subscribers can still opt-in to receiving the physical discs, but everyone else, especially newsstand purchasers will receive a special code in each issue to download their digital samplers.  I love the idea of a special printed code unique to each magazine/person, but I like the idea of a physical CD and DVD more.   But that’s likely just my prehistoric self showing a fondness for shinny objects…

SO, why should musicians and bands care about Paste?  Because they are clearly paying attention to the trends toward digital.  And while most music magazines are still struggling to figure out how to survive, Paste seems to have things well in-hand.  The Paste website, according to both traffic monitors Alexa and Compete, saw some of the highest traffic counts in their online history right towards the end of 2008.  And while Rolling Stone still has several hundred thousand more website visitors (and magazine readers) than paste, during 2008 the traffic to Paste’s website grew by 571% compared to Rolling Stone’s meager increase of 17% (according Compete.com).

Beyond the slick digital sampler code, Paste has also created a VIP club for just $3.95 per month that I’ll be joining very shortly as well.  Beyond a cool “Members Only” t-shirt, I will also score early access to the next 11 issues of Paste digitally, all the back issues digitally, 24 full albums (digital), 11 digital samplers, exclusive MP3’s and finally a handful of those DVD Samplers that I loved so much, so many years ago.  If you want to be as cool as I’m going to be, you can subscribe as well by visiting their VIP page.  Might be your best $4 music investment for the month.

In the meantime, here’s what you need to know to get your music to Paste magazine and to their monthly Paste Culture Club podcast:

Contact Nate Douglas at:
Paste Magazine
Attn: Reviews
PO Box 1606
Decatur, GA 30031

Once your stuff arrives, follow up with Nate by email or phone: 404-207-1182

For the Paste Culture Club Podcast, contact Kevin Keller by email or phone: 404-207-1190

I look forward to reading about your band, hearing your music and watching your vids, all on the new digital versions of Paste!

-pjc

Doing What You Love Will Not Lead to Fame or Fortune

Earlier this week I was having a conversation with a musician who is struggling to save his money to have his demo disc duplicated. I said something like, “You should do something special with the first thousand – sign & number them or something.  After that you’ll have the momentum and the cash to do more.”

This statement caught him by surprise. He wasn’t thinking about anything more than the first 1,000 copies of his CD.  In his mind, that first batch was all there would be. This person isn’t short-sighted and he wants to make music his lifelong career, but he just hand not thought in terms of scope – that there would be THOUSANDS of people who wanted to hear his music.

This is the Entrepreneurial Myth in action (also referred to as the E-Myth). The basic premise is that if you know how to do the technical aspect of something, and even if you LOVE doing that something, whether its music, art, fixing cars, doing taxes, cutting hair or cutting the lawn, that the worst thing that you could do is get into that thing as a business.  In 1985 a powerful business book was written about this subject by Michael Gerber, oddly enough called The E-Myth.  The basic problem is that if you know HOW to do the technical part of the business, like playing music, you will not do all the strategic parts of business (marketing, promotion, bookkeeping, bookings, etc.) that will cause your business to thrive.

How many people do you know who could do some technical work so they thought they could open their own Remodeling/Painting/Landscaping/Repair shop? And how many of us have had really bad experiences with those same businesses?   Are you doing the same with your music?  How much time to you set aside each week to focus on promotion, marketing and customer satisfaction?  Let me give you two real-world examples. Or maybe we’ll call these “reality” world examples.

Do you know why the band Kiss is still around, after 37 years? Unlike the Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen, it isn’t because they are still putting out solid new albums.  Kiss is still here, and being talked about because of Gene Simmons.  If you haven’t seen his Family Jewels TV show, it should be required viewing for any musician or band that expects to make a career in music. Gene is the definition on an entrepreneur. He can’t write a song to save his life and his vocals are pretty rough around the edges, but what Gene delivers is total attention to marketing, licensing, promotion and customer satisfaction.  He makes sure that everyone is happy with what they got for their ticket price. I know we were all members of the Kiss army back in the day, but have you tried to listen to a Kiss album all the way through recently?  Do yourself a favor, put Season One of Family Jewels on your To-Do list for this week and get back to me after you’ve completed season three and tell me you haven’t learned something about the music business or just business in general.

My Trifecta of reality shows are basically The Apprentice, Family Jewels and Chef Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. I have eaten at one of the 11 restaurants that Mr. Ramsey owns in NYC and it was one of the most absolutely amazing meals I’ve ever had.  The man not only knows how to create an amazing culinary experience with each of his restaurants, but he also helps other restaurant owners. The premise for one of his two reality shows, Kitchen Nightmares, is that he travels to a restaurant in the US and helps the owners and the staff come to terms with how bad their restaurant is.  He provides them with the reality that the hundreds of thousands of dollars they’ve lost, is a direct result of usually just a handful of normal business tactics (inventory control, portion size, marketing, customer experience, etc.).  What I always find impressive is that in nearly every episode he draws the owner and the staff OUTSIDE their business and attempts to get them engaged with the outside world.  He gets them to give something away for free, like meatballs or pizza slices, as a way to build local buzz.  He almost always invites the local mayor, governor or a local celebrity to take part in the new Grand Re-Opening. Where so many businesses fail is in engaging their local market, because most restaurant owners would rather run their business or, to use Gerber terms “they work IN their business instead working ON their business” that they fail to be relevant to their own local customers.

So this week, work ON your music!  You will always find the time to do the work in you love, but please dedicate time to developing relationships with your potential friends, fans and followers.  Find a few music blogs that you enjoy and post some comments on the writing and the music. Develop a list of 20 radio stations that you want to send your CD to and then SEND IT. Work on getting your music heard as much as you work on creating your music.  And be sure to watch Family Jewels for other important music business lessons from Professor Gene.

-pjc

Dedicated to Your New Album?

Tyler Irish is not just a new friend of mine, he’s also lead singer/guitarist/lyricist for the NY band Take One Car. This band is heavy on guitar, actually guitar to the third power, with some surprisingly solid vocals coming from the often soft-spoken Mr. Irish himself. Being that we are friends, and co-workers, I have been in tune with the process that Tyler and his band mates have endured in making their latest album.

And “endured” might even be an understatement in the making of their new album, When the Ceiling Meets the Floor.  For about five months straight, Tyler would leave his home in NY and travel 90 minutes to work in Connecticut, then travel nearly the same time back to the studio, four or five times per week to record.   After recording into the early morning hours, Tyler would then drive about 40 minutes to get home, sleep for a few hours and then get up to do it all again.  Weekends were spent rehearsing, writing or playing a few live shows.

About half way through the recording process, Tyler’s car was hit from behind one morning on his way to work, by a bus driver. So in the midst of the recording process and $4 per gallon gas, Tyler was dealing with borrowed cars, hospital visits and insurance red tape attempting to screw him out of whatever they could.  Despite a slight concussion, Tyler and the guys held it together long enough to keep things moving forward during their nightly rendezvous at the studio.  Almost like the “two weeks” scenes out of The Money Pit, whenever someone asked Tyler were they were at in the recording process, for months the answer always seemed to be “about half-way done.”

While the personal commitments I’ve outlined are clear, what’s not usually seen or heard about are the personal relationships.  The seven months of recording, mixing and mastering the album cost the band two marriages and one serious relationship.  That’s something that does not show up on the bottom line, but should not go without mention.  Being dedicated to your music or your art, almost always comes with a price.  Those who can do both and keep their family life, business relationships and personal relationships intact, should receive medals.

Now the album is officially complete – See Tyler’s blog post and picture of the final mastered disc. Tyler gave me a copy of the master just yesterday and it really sounds amazing.  I’ll be first in line to buy 10 copies, so if you’re interested in hearing it, sign-up for my mailing list using the form on the far right of this page and I’ll send a copy to the first 10 people who put “Take One Car” in the Notes box.

During our lunch yesterday, I asked Tyler about touring to support the new release.  It sounded like he wasn’t certain.  I’m not sure if he said that because we work together and he would be concerned about loosing his job or because he truly hadn’t given it a lot of thought.  One of the original founders of Take One Car returns to the US in Spring and with the new album being released in March, it just seems to make sense.

After all this time, tragedy and personal sacrifice, the idea of NOT touring to support, and to truly celebrate this effort is totally foreign to me.  And this is not just directed toward Tyler or the band, but to all of those who’ve committed to getting their tracks heard.  To not take to the open road and meet people and visit places you have never seen before, seems like more than a missed life opportunity.  The supporting tour seems like the payoff, the return on your life invested.

There is a great moment in the movie Elizabethtown where a former musician fondly recalls his glory days; “That was my band. This was the show we opened for Lynyrd fucking Skynyrd.”  Whether you realize it or not, these are your glory days.  Please take your bow.

-pjc

Your comments below are HIGHLY appreciated, but please be sure to include a URL to your website or social network page.  Any Comments submitted without a connection to a legitimate website or page will not be approved.  And spammers and sploggers can suck my cancerous nut – wherever in Hell that might be.

Bands Get Lucky – 75% of Active Music Buyers have Social Media Pages

Earlier this week, Ars Technica featured a brief summary of a recent study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life project.  While you can read both of these summaries by clicking the links, this study demonstrates an important point for musicians and bands using social media networks for promotion; You are hitting the target!

During my days in the radio and music business, I had heard repeatedly that the music you listen to between the ages of 15-24 will be the music you listen to for the rest of your life.  If you are in your thirties or forties or older now, and you look at your music collection, do you find that to be true?  Odds are that you are not buying as much or listening to as much NEW music as what you did during those years.  I think 80% of us would admit that the music we enjoyed during high school, college and our early adult years is likely to be the music we will take to the grave with us.  When they put my stinky body in the ground, I want two songs played, one by The National that just came out in 2008 and one by Bob Seger that came out  when I was 15.

This dual study, surveying nearly 5,000 people,  shows that 75% of people between the ages of 18-24 and 57% of people between the ages of 25-34 have social network profiles (MySpace, Facebook and Twitter being at the top of the list). The take home here, for all you musicians, is that is THE core music loving/listening/buying audience. MySpace is popular with music lovers and the youngsters because those two “demographics” are usually one in the same.

In a prior music news post this week I mentioned how Facebook’s traffic trend is significantly better than MySpace’s.  But the other reality is that MySpace still has more users and those users are, on average younger than the current Facebook crowd.  Again, the suggestion is not that you should pick just one, but that you should be aware of the trends and get your music to where the music loving/buying/touring fans actually are.  Establishing important connections to people in this age group today will mean many years of support as you both age together.  Need proof?  Go see the Stones or Bruce Springsteen live.  This study is very positive news for those of you already making the connections on all the social networks.

-pjc

Your comments below are HIGHLY appreciated, but please be sure to include a URL to your website or social network page.  Any Comments submitted without a connection to a legitimate website or page will not be approved.  And spammers and sploggers can suck my cancerous nut – wherever in hell that might be.

Facebook Traffic Surpasses MySpace – Music Services Proposed

Within the past week, two very important stories have broken regarding Facebook that independent musicians and bands should be aware of. These two emerging trends should clearly point out the importance of having a Facebook presence in maintaining a social connection to you and for your music.

Brian Solis, big thinker, co-founder of the Social Media Club and author a great book called Now is Gone, was the first to report on the fact that, for the first time ever, traffic to Facebook surpassed MySpace this past December.

In his blog post from this past Tuesday, Mr. Solis reveals that the popularity of social network, Facebook, reached 2.18% of all Internet visits on this past Christmas Eve. While this could have been the season to wish you and yours a holly, jolly seasons greetings, it was also a more ominous sign for long time social front runner MySpace. While the traffic to MySpace is not yet even close to an exodus from their 76 million users, this chart on Compete shows that the trend is not certainly not making very positive gains over their accomplishments in 2007. It actually shows MySpace.com traffic down nearly 10%. Has MySpace run out of gas? How many new friends have you added in the past six months? What new innovations have you been excited about that have you drawn you or your friends back to MySpace?

This is the point when you say, “Yeah, but Facebook doesn’t get my music heard.” This morning’s post by TechCrunch’s Micheal Arrington, called How Warner Music Killed Facebook Music, is a must read. This post provides some very important behind-the-scenes details of the efforts that this highly popular social network in taking on in order to get music into the lives of their 55 million users. While there are already several Facebook music apps, obviously a solution provided by the network itself will gain much greater acceptance over plug-ins and strap-ons.  Or is that strap-on and plug in?

This morale of this short story, and the reason for highlighting these two new Facebook trends, is to remind independent musicians and bands of one VERY important element. Social Networks need people and keeping people happy these days is not an easy job – ask any retailer. Your task is to follow those people who are likely interested in you and your music. Capture your friends, fans and followers by getting email addresses and zip/postal codes. If you cannot reach out and touch your tribe with a simple email message, then you are relying on technology that is not as social or as beneficial as you might believe. If MySpace, Twitter OR Facebook closed down tomorrow, what tangible information do you have on your following?  This is an important question and one that will likely require action from you and your band mates.

-pjc

Music Purchases Surge to 1.5 Billion in 2008!

Yahoo! is reporting the 2008 Nielsen/SoundScan music sales numbers for the music industry.  In a world full of record unemployment, reduced consumption, crashing stock markets, housing market declines and war, is it really any surprise that the world is turning to music for comfort?  Yes, music purchases INCREASED 10.5% in 2008 versus 2007 according to this report.

The link above will provide the spreadsheet view of these statistics, but if you want the Top 5  points about this recording breaking music sales years, here they are in no particular order for your consumption:

1. Digital Albums OUTSOLD Physical Albums sold over the internet by over TWICE as much (65.8M vs 27.5M). The general trend is that the online sales of physical albums (CDs mostly) was down 8.6% over 2007, while Digital Albums sales reached a new record in 2008 and was up 32% over 2007.   Bottom line is, if you had your new CD and the same new album digitally on Amazon, the average here is stating that you were likely to sell more than TWICE as many digital vs. physical online.

2.  One bright spot in the physical sales stats here was good old VINYL. The report states the vinyl album sales nearly doubled from the 1m purchases during 2007 to 1.8M in 2008.  These are PURCHAES, not sales volumes.  Maybe that limited edition, signed and numbered idea has merit after all (and profit too). The top selling vinyl album in 2008 was Radiohead’s In Rainbows which sold 25,800 copies. A distant second was The Beatles Abbey Road with 16,000 copies.

3.  This report is focused on the 1.5 billion music purchases – not sales.  The vast majority of those purchases?  Digital Music Tracks equated for over 1,070,000,000 purchases during 2008, which set a new record and grew 27% over the 844M purchases in 2007. The top selling digital album for 2008 was Coldplay’s Viva La Vida which sold 617,000 times with Jack Johnson’s Sleep Through the Static a distant second with 325,000 digital album purchases.

4.  Nielsen uses three ways to categorize Albums based upon its age; Current, Catalog and Deep Catalog. We will not spend time here in this summary to get into all the details, but we mainly want to convey this; Of the three categories for DIGITAL albums, the one with the strongest growth during 2008 was Deep Catalog, up 41% over 2007.  Current Digital  Albums were up 27% and Catalog Digital Albums were up 37%.   I think this clearly conveys that its not just the new “current” music that is being purchased digitally. Digital albums grew to represent 15% of total album sales in 2008, after representing 10% in 2007 and just 5.5in 2006.

5. The Digital field gets wider:

• 2005: only two songs sold more than 1 million digital copies.
• 2006: 22 songs sold more than 1 million digital copies.
• 2007 : 41 songs sold more than 1 million digital copies.
• 2008: 71 songs sold more than 1 million digital copies.

With Apple’s recent decision to remove DRM copy-protection from iTunes tracks, it’s not hard to predict over 100 tracks will sell more than 1 million copies during 2009.  Will yours be one of them?

Finally, I find it odd that the Nielsen “factoids” section goes to lengths to mention that Metallica’s Death Magnet was the number one selling Internet Album (a physical disc being sold by an online store) with 144,000 units sold. But FAIL to mention that they sold more digital copies of the same album (158,000) but Metallica was at the bottom of that top 10 digital album chart.  Why is that newsworthy or “Factoid” worthy to Neilsen?

-pjc

Hype Machine Churns Out the Hits

Hype Machine is an amazingly simple website that answers one question very well;  Which tracks are being covered most by music blogs over the past three days?

The result is a very easy to understand and access set of charts that should put Billboard magazine to shame.

Beyond being an solid source for the popular music being covered by thousands of music bloggers, Hype Machine also has a player built into the bottom of their page which preloads with the song at the top of the particular chart you’ve selected.  Chart options include; Latest, Popular, Radio and Spy.  While Latest and Popular should be self-explanatory, Radio is actually monitoring songs beings played by online stations.  Spy is simply collecting random mp3 tracks from the music blogs being frequently checked – consider your “feeling lucky” option.

While I’ve only visited the Hype Machine a few times, most of the music I’ve heard has been heavy on the dance, remixes and mash-ups.  I will not claim to be an expert on current musical trends, but there may be some genres left out of their blog rotation.  One of the important elements that should be understood is the SEARCH function.  Type in an artist you know and not only will you find tracks available for both streaming and downloading, but you’ll also find references to other SIMILAR sounding artists.  A sound way to discover new sounds.

We will use this resource, along with other tools, to help us target the most popular music blogs to review.

-pjc

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