latest digital developments

[Gill Smith]

Some musos are bypassing iTunes/Spotify/etc

putting their music online and using PayPal to get paid directly

anyone here planning this route?

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http://www.gillsmith999.plus.com/

[Rick Paul]

"Gill Smith" <gill.sm...@googlemail.com> wrote in message
news:5IqdnQFReKjYJd_X...@brightview.co.uk...

> Some musos are bypassing iTunes/Spotify/etc
>
> putting their music online and using PayPal to get paid directly
>
> anyone here planning this route?

I've experimented with a slight variation on that in the past, namely the
widget MySpace used to have to make stuff available wherever you wanted. I
don't recall the name of the company that put it out at the moment.

I think if you've got a good following, that's probably a pretty good
approach, at least as one option. If you don't, though, it's like offering
your wares in a store that no customers enter, rather than having it
available in WalMart. I never made a single sale through the widget I
mentioned, and I had it not only on my MySpace page, but also on my own web
site. I eventually just took it down. Meanwhile, I'd been selling small,
but relatively steady, quantities in the major stores, mostly on iTunes at
the time, though nowadays AmazonMP3 is a reasonably close second, and others
like Rhapsody, eMusic, Napster and a few others also provide some sales and
paid streams.

Even if I had a big following, though, I don't think I'd take that route
exclusively. It would cut out the potential sale to someone who didn't know
to stop at your web site at a given time, but might have been browsing for
music in some other service and come across your latest offering. You lose
the moment if they can't buy it on the spot, and that might lose the sale in
cases where the customer would buy on impulse but isn't so dedicated to
buying that they'll do a bunch of extra work to seek out the product in the
one place you make it available. (Not to mention they probably wouldn't
have found it in the first place in this scenario.)

To put it another way, it's great when buyers come to you, but it also helps
to go to where the buyers are.

Rick
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Rick Paul
Closet Cowboy Music (ASCAP)
Web: www.RickPaul.info
MySpace: www.myspace.com/rickpaulmusic
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