July 18, 2012 Half a Million Downloads and 500,000 Dilemmas
Allow me to start at the end:
And in the end, I feel conflicted about the project. As I continue to build my songwriting career, I feel encouraged by the numbers. 500,000 people downloaded my music (and not the easy way - they had to create a profile on a single clunky website to get the songs). 400,000 people have watched my YouTube videos. I don’t care what anybody says - you don’t get those numbers with crappy music. Someday, maybe, people will say, “Man, did you know that Dave Hahn had a million YouTube views before he had a hit?”
On the other hand, in the two years I’ve been working on the project, I’ve made $673.02.
$673.02 is about what it costs to live in Manhattan for 4 days.
Intro
This is essentially a story about a side project that took off. And it’s about the state of the music industry today. And it’s about fart jokes. Well, not fart jokes, but whatever the musical equivalent of fart jokes is. Which is:
Ringtones.
Ringtones?
I was bored, maybe. I had been ignoring my songwriting side for too long. I had spent all my time hustling after gigs on Broadway and no time on music that I really loved (no offense, Broadway).
Songs started coming out. Silly ones at first. Goofy ones. Marginally inappropriate ones. But all catchy. And they were funny - some of them very funny.
So I started recording them and showing my friends on Facebook. And people liked them! 300 downloads in an hour - that kind of liked them.
It’s fun to make things that people like, so I made more. They were just 30-second joke songs. It occurred to me that they’d make great ringtones, so I started writing them with that in mind. I made about 30 of them in, I think, about 2 weeks.
If you’d like, you can listen to them here.
My friends wanted to know how to get them on their phones - and what could I tell them? How would I know? I’m not a phone expert.
The Rush
So I found a site that would let me distribute homemade ringtones - Myxer.com. I put them up for free and my friends would download them to their phones. But then everybody seemed to get into it - 2,000 downloads a day, that kind of everybody.
I thought, “Wow, cool. Goofy or not, these are songs I wrote and people really dig them. That’s a really great feeling.”
And also: “There’s a real demand here. I could start a whole business. I’ll have my friend make a logo. I’ll make a website. I’ll start developing an app.”
And finally: “I’ll just charge $1 each. Perhaps I won’t get 2,000 downloads a day, but surely a percentage of these people will pay $1 for these songs.”
But I was wrong. People wouldn’t pay a dollar. Downloads fell immediately to maybe six a day, then nothing. I made the price just $0.50 each - still nothing. I put it back to free for a day and within a few hours the rush was back. 2,000 a day or more.
Part of the problem was Myxer - they promote free ringtones on their home page and dismiss the premium ringtones to the abyss of invisible content standing dormant in the innards of their site.
And part of the problem was the medium. You can sell ringtones yourself, but there’s two problems:
- There are more than 50 different ringtone file formats used in the world. Which is difficult enough in itself, but then it’s combined with #2…
- As I described before, people want to know how to get your ringtone on their 1997 Zach Morris brick phone (or similar), which you don’t know how to do - especially for 2,000 people a day.
I’m sure you can picture the dilemma. I had to use Myxer, but Myxer was no help.
“Ok, fine,” I thought, “I don’t care if people ever hear this music. If somebody wants the ringtone on their phone it costs $1.” It stayed like that for awhile. I made maybe $0.90 a month.
My Wise Friend
A little while later a songwriter friend came to stay with me. I told him the story, complete with my indignation over the unfairness of Myxer and those fickle ringtone consumers!
He said, “Look, man, you’re a songwriter. Would you rather have 2,000 people a day hear your music, or 3 people a day?”
And, wisely, “How much money would you pay to have 2,000 people a day listen to your music? Would you pay $0.90?”
I felt like he made a good point. And what was there to do? By then I’d submitted the songs to all the placement services I knew of at the time - without any responses back. They’d be great in a cell phone commercial, I imagined, but landing a major corporate placement was a big leap from my little perch in the Broadway scene. I was now selling them on the iTunes Ringtone Store through Tunecore, but marketing options were limited (ie, you can’t link to a ringtone in the iTunes Store - hell, you can’t even see them unless you are looking at iTunes from a mobile device).
So I made them free.
And I promoted them. I created YouTube videos for them. For awhile I had a whole site for them (now absorbed into Songwriter.fm). I released a 27-track, mastered album (with commissioned album art even!) of these funny ringtones.
Counterintuitively, making the ringtones free and promoting them actually helped grow sales in the iTunes Store (perhaps an important lesson in itself). These days the Tunecore revenue is around $80-100/month. And the YouTube channel brings in ad revenue - a humble amount I’m not allowed to disclose as part of the standard Adsense contract.
And now they’ve been downloaded to 500,000 cell phones worldwide. They’ve been viewed on YouTube 400,000 times.
And I’ve made a profit of $673.02.
Conclusion
So, in the end, you already know how I feel. I think I’ve succeeded (in a quirky, farty-joke kind of way) as a songwriter on this project. I wrote songs people like to listen to - songs people share with their friends. That is a difficult thing to do in any format or any genre.
But I didn’t make much money. And maybe that’s just how it goes this time. Maybe that’s what I get for making musical fart jokes. If I’d written an ALBUM (like a NORMAL HUMAN BEING) that was formally downloaded 500k times, I might have a different story to tell.
So maybe that’s what I’ll do.
What would you do?
Reader Comments (11)
It looks like ringtone downloads are falling as a whole. Granted, these aren't the most current studies, but I think they're accurate enough to indicate the decline.
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/09/ringtones-continue-decline.html
http://mashable.com/2011/12/16/ringtones-decline/
According to Music Production Schools' data, which tracked Myxer downloads, rap is the most popular ringtone genre by far. The comedy genre is significantly lower.
Additionally, many artists who make a living in music rely on multiple revenue streams. Album sales, merch sales, tour revenue, fan funding campaigns, sponsorships, and the like.
My takeaway is selling comedy ringtones reaches a (relatively) small audience and doesn't lend itself to multiple revenue streams. When applying all of that to your situation, it looks like the earning potential is somewhat low. I'll be the first to admit I don't know a ton about the ringtone business, but that's what it looks like to an outsider.
Wes makes a good point, It's just a sign of the times. If you did this amidst of the ringtone craze (what was it, 3-4 yrs ago?), you'd be laughing all the way to the bank. But whatever, you''ll land something big cause of your talent and determination. Keep up the good work and thanks for all the info always!
I wonder how much 2 factors come into play in this situation... branding and connection.
These two kind of go together... When I say brand what I mean is your personality/you as an individual that people are interested in. I can't imagine that it shows through strongly on 30 second songs (but I could be wrong). We live in a day and age where fans of music are obsessed with the musicians themselves and their looks and personalities. It's no longer fashionable to be removed in any way from your audience. You are your own brand. In a world that is competing for attention from multiple angles every minute, an artist has to be not only be bold in their art, but with themselves also.
That's part of the connection right there. 30 seconds isn't a lot of time to make a connection with something. People do connect with comedy, but it has to be smart comedy, not your run of the mill comedy. Again, I think the 30 snippets may have lost some of the potential for connection with your audience. In a world where songs 3-5 minutes long are losing monetary value by the day, 30 second songs stand less of a chance.
Can you play these songs live? Have you? It's not enough to just put music up on the net and expect for money to roll right in. You have to get your name and work out there as much as possible while creating and promoting multiple forms of revenue streams. If you noticed one song sold more than others why not put the something funny from the song on a t-shirt? Have you done any interviews about your work in publications or the internet? Have you advertised on comedy websites? What HAVE you done to promote yourself and your music?
Free album download at www.facebook.com/chancius
To quote KRS-One "sell your image, never sell a record". Or in this case, a ringtone :)
Very interesting story.
From my experience I can tell you that ringtones still sell, the iTunes ringtones section on the iPhone has revitalized this market, really.
Even with no promotion and being totally unknown, you can make sales.
I'm not saying you'll become a millionaire with iPhone ringtones, but you can generate some revenue quite easily.
Can I have the $1 back for the ringtone I purchased since it's apparently free now?
As a musician I am totally convinced that the music business strategies for success has not changed, perhaps never will, the competition out there, in the real world of venues and record labels is a fierce battle where artists and bands perform, it takes endurance, dedication and surrender to a serious music career, been in the right place at the right time with the right music and a positive attitude bigger than any fear!
The free download dilemas could easily be solved if new bands and artists would provide short music samples of their works rather than uploading full albums, a common mistake made on this time and age... also the problem with new music writers is that very few are willing to perform live because it involves work, hard work and sacrifice. hauling and setting gear to the next gig!
most people nowadays just expect to make it big by recording a song then uploading it to the internet, to make things worse many of them "free download" sites out there have no other purpose than milking the cow, offering an "artist" webpage in exchange of uploading their music with misleading promises of promotion, sales, "opportunities" and even offering prizes for music contests...of course all for a monthly fee... it just reminescence of the "Pay-to-play" thing that has been going on during decades disguised under different names such as "Open Mic" where venues provide free entertainment for their clientele... The music industry sharks just found an easy way to prey on small fish, always looking for victims. Take a closer look at legendary successfull bands and artists, they all walked their way up playing live!
The problem (pretty clearly identified here) is the distribution platform. The distributors are doing whatever they can to maximize their short term profit with no respect for the content or the artists. May sound familiar to those remaining from the label days, but it is worse now because there is no negotiation, no thought of sharing revenues, and the content producers have no leverage or contractual rights. So yes brand, identity, artistic longevity and the financial sustainability of the content producer is a non-factor for anyone involved (except for the essentially uncompensated creators who can't remain content producers if all they do is produce content). Journalists (and newspapers/magazines as well) have the same dilemma in another field of content production. Those involved in film are no doubt facing pressure too, but so far people do still pay (a lot) to go to theaters and feature films are not subject to being commoditized due to the steep barriers to production.
The function and value of art is being undermined but at the same time producing entertainment for a living is also losing viability.
these days yeah, ringtones are going down.. maybe 5-6 years ago it could've worked out better, but not now.. but i thought it was a well known thing - the fact that artists cannot really make good money on tracks (as single entities), but the majority of the revenue comes from the concerts, from festivals, club nights, party performances, etc. basically, from tours.. wish you all the best, though.
Half a million Youtube videos should earn you a lot more than $600. I would say around $1500 but
maybe the rates have gone down or your video was not generating enough clicks.
Interesting article and I would say it would be a good idea to do a plan which would incorporate how you would monetise these 500,000 people. The music industry can't sustain itself and you would need to co-op another business with it.
The numbers are impressive, but there has to be a better way to monetize that traffic if you're getting the people already the next step is converting them into profit. At least is shows how much your music is enjoyed, but at least throw ads on those youtube videos! :P