Back in the day, everyone wanted CDs, tapes or records, now most of the music we listen to is streamed or downloads. A lot of bands get carried away with playlist and CD and forget to have an easy way to sell downloads live.
If you’re a band or a busker and you want my £5-10 you have to have a way for me to get your songs on my phone. Honestly a CD is useless and a waste of money, records are cool but very expesive and slow to get made and while tapes are coming back they suck too, downloads are easy and have many pro’s.
- Benefits of downloads
- 100% profit
- Fast to make
- Set up a scan point anywhere
- download to playing device (ie.phone downloads and plays)
Most of us listen to music on our phones, imagine your a busker and inside your guitar case is a big sign with a massive QR code. It says “free download with any gold coin donation.” they scan the code and it zaps them to a google drive page an they can download the .MP3 for free.
Streaming vs sales
Streaming vs sales is lame, streaming, curators and playlists is one thing but if you want to make a living off music, you need to sell it. The great thing about a “virtual Release” is you can sell the tracks at £1.00 and make 100% profit. It’s also not adding to our waste problem.
Imagine you have a 10 track ep and you sell it live and on bandcamp (add link) for £10 pound, you have 200 fans who buy it and your band gets £2,000. Now if everyone plays each song 10 times, that’s 20,000 streams. On Spotify you get 0.0045 (ish)(USD) per stream, or $90 USD.
Playlists, curators, streams
If you are a genre band,like folk, celtic, punk, rock, you can do very well if you get on a very popular playlist that has heap of plays. The spotify “Celtic Punk” playlist has over 266k fans, and getting on it can help a lot. While you should try get on spotify lists, i think people are obsessed with playlists and forget about sales.
How to sell live with a QR code
So you have a new ep out it’s four tracks and you want to sell it live at gig, is this possible, can you sell digital download at your merch desk? yes you can and it’s pretty easy and cheap.
Add music to google drive (free)
- Make sure your music is .mp3
- go to google drive (free) www.drive.google.com
- Make a new folder for the download (band name)
- Upload .mp3s (click new -upload file)
- click on folder name – click: get link – Change link permission to anyone with link.
- get link like this: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UCXq1aPPSTnGs9zBT78R89drfyVFJHie?usp=sharing
- check link in new browser window
Make link into QR code
A QR code is just a link, that any phone can access. If you have a big messy link, like: Https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UCXq1aPPSTnGs9zBT78R89drfyVFJHie?usp=sharing, then you need to make it into a QR for the phone.
- download QR code chrome extension
- Pin it to the top
- click button in new page to make qr code
- download and use
Now you have a QR code that should work, do send it to a friend a test it out. Then you can lay it out on a virtual album cover and print it.