Rdio, Spotify, Bandcamp, QRD, Upcoming Releases, Etc.

So as a lot of you know I have super mixed feelings about free streaming of music.  I totally understand it is awesome for the consumer.  It’s convenient & easy.  But of course it also means not a lot of income for artists.  So it’s with somewhat mixed feelings that I have been trying to push Silber a bit on Spotify & Rdio.  We’ll see what happens.  Will me mentioning it get people to play the catalog while they are falling asleep or all day at work or whatever & help to reclaim the sales numbers from five years ago before the streaming craze started?  I really don’t have a clue.  But like a lot of other things, it’s probably easier to tell people in conversation, “I tried it & it didn’t work,” than to try to explain why I think it won’t.  So we’ll see on that, for now both Spotify & Rdio have Silber playlists on our drop down link menus throughout the main site.  If someone is on the iTunes equivalent of Spotify & wants to make a Silber playlist for me to link to, let me know.

Also in my recent, “I’ll try it even though I don’t think it will work,” I put the QRD – The Guitarists comp up on Bandcamp.  I’ve avoided Bandcamp for a few reasons over the years, mainly because I had a bad experience downloading from them around the time of their original launch & I already have the Silber download shop set up & don’t see a huge benefit of directing people off site & giving someone else an extra portion of my income.  But a few people have told me they actually do use it as a discovery engine & I do know that bloggers love to embed stuff from it, so I figured I’d give it a shot.  So far it’s been a week & it’s received a hundred listens.  Which I guess is impressive?  But it hasn’t received any purchases of any of the tracks much less the whole thing.  So I’m not really convinced I should dedicate a couple of weeks to uploading the entire Silber catalog.  I feel I would be better served just waiting until the comp was up on Spotify & at least getting those tenths of a penny for play rather than the unpaid streams on Bandcamp.  Sigh.  I’m not abandoning it after a week, but I’m waiting for something good to happen.

The other big thing this year in my trying it out thing of course was the ebook stuff that is the whole reason there is the guitarist comp.  So I put up a few of my comics & I made the guitarist & bass player interview ebooks & put them up on Amazon with the hope of the ease of discovery there.  Well, they made $16.  Which I guess is great, because I really didn’t drive any traffic in that direction as I really only pushed the Kickstarter stuff for those projects anyway.  But I had hoped a few more sales would happen.  I know a few people who have had luck with ebooks & others who have had numbers even worse than mine.  So I’m not sure I should make the other ebooks from the QRD content.  It doesn’t really seem too worth it with those numbers.  But I am hopeful a bit with things on Patreon for QRD slowly turning things around there.

Speaking of QRD, I have a new issue that I finished the initial proofs of the interviews for.  So about four or five hours of work to finish it up, but I’m going to wait until I have some other things ready to go so that when I send the Silber newsletter out it’s fairly impressive.

So here’s my question to you folks that are still reading this entry.  The next release we have coming is the Macedonian drone music compilation, but I’m looking for input on ranking of the importance/order I should do the following, below is the proposal given that nothing goes wrong & a bunch of you aren’t telling me to speed up one thing or another:various artists – across the mountains Macedonian ambient music compilation
Thorn1 – The Light of Random Star
If Thousands re-issues Candace Recorder & IO
Rllrbll re-issues Bathing Music & Long Walk for Ice Cream
Electric Bird Noise re-issue Unleashing the Inner Robot & Soundtrack for the Motion Picture The Pace
Halcyon Chamber – Halcyon Chamber EP
5 in 5 series relaunch (Goddakk, Parties, Lost Trail, Black Wedding, PD Wilder, Matteo Preabianca, Remora, Small Life Form)
Space Sweeper – “title to be determined”
Remora – “title to be determined” (live full band recording)
various artists – Cheerleading/Noise compilation
Yellow6 – “title to be determined”
Chvad SB – Phenomenalism, Cartesian Doubt, & Bomb #20

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One Response to Rdio, Spotify, Bandcamp, QRD, Upcoming Releases, Etc.

  1. So I’m thinking about launching a digital subscription series, here are a couple proposals I’ve come up with:
    5 in 5 – get the next 15 EPs for just $10
    Albums – get the next ten albums & receive all EPs released in interim free for $50.

    Comments?