Giving your fans more choices to increase music sales

As an artist, you know full well how dif­fi­cult it is to make money from your songs, espe­cially when the major­ity of rev­enue derived from new fans is from sin­gle downloads.

The Buzz Factor’s Bob Baker unrav­els a work­able pricing/packaging model at hypebot.com show­ing how an artist can increase their rev­enue by tar­get­ing your fan base divided by new fans, casual fans, and core.  The premise behind this, is that by offer­ing mul­ti­ple options of the way your songs are pack­aged and made avail­able, you will be able to tap into the dif­fer­ent seg­ments of your fan base who will in turn, pur­chase your record­ings that fits within their preferences.

For instance, Scott Cohen; man­ager of the band The Raveonettes, found that the major­ity of their music sales were from sin­gle track down­loads. Like most bands, they offered their fans the option to down­load their entire album, or each track indi­vid­u­ally. Ulti­mately, they weren’t max­i­miz­ing sales.

To coun­ter­act this prob­lem, they decided to change it up and do a lit­tle exper­i­ment­ing. Instead of con­tin­u­ing their same dis­tri­b­u­tion strat­egy, Cohen decided to add a third option: Three, EP for­mats split up into 5 songs each.

Here was their break­down regard­ing formats:

1. Full length dig­i­tal album– $7.99

2. Sin­gle dig­i­tal down­load– .99

3. EP for­mat (5 songs ea.) — $3.99

True, the third option is actu­ally mak­ing less money “per unit” then each song indi­vid­u­ally, how­ever as a whole, they have increased their sales.

So now, they impact all seg­ments of their fan base as follows:

1) Core Fans: Have the option of down­load­ing the full album

2) Casual Fans: Now have the new option of down­load­ing EP’s at a lesser price than what they would pay individually.

3) New Fans: Sin­gle downloads

Pack­ag­ing is every­thing, and often down­played by many artists because they don’t fully under­stand the prin­ci­ples of mar­ket­ing. Effec­tive pack­ag­ing means that the addi­tional offer­ing AND the price of that offer­ing have to work collectively.

To tap into the addi­tional “casual fan” seg­ment as show above, you are pair­ing the offer of more songs with a price that serves to dis­cour­age pur­chas­ing sin­gle for­mat down­loads. The beauty of this, is that it’s a win-win. The con­sumer gets more bang for their buck, and the artist increases revenue.

Remem­ber, everyone’s sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent and under­stand­ing your fan base and how it relates to your genre is para­mount to know what type of pric­ing strate­gies and offers to use. Still, this is a great exam­ple of how to use mar­ket­ing effec­tively to cre­ate pos­i­tive results and ulti­mately increase your music sales!

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