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Since I’ve been going geo-crazy lately, here are some data pictures (wheee!!):

subscriber locations

Red markers for anyone who subscribed and entered their location in the past couple of days.

album sale locations

Blue markers for a couple years of album sale data.

subscribers and album sale locations

Not shown: Antarctica — not big fans of mine apparently.

If you want to stand up and be counted, you can sign up on the Live page.

Trent Reznor released some facts about the Saul Williams record he produced and then released digitally for $5 [nin.com]:

Saul’s previous record was released in 2004 and has sold 33,897 copies.

As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.

Of those paying,

3220 chose 192kbps MP3
19,764 chose 320kbps MP3
5338 chose FLAC

Thoughts:

• 28,322 * $5 = $141,610 which for a solo artist and zero marketing investment seems pretty decent. Of course partnering with a super famous established artist like Trent helps.
• With 154,449 downloads and earnings of $141,610 that works out to earning $0.92 per download which vastly exceeds all bandwidth costs.
• 154,449 seems like an extremely low number of downloads. The hype for this album was primarily in nerd-centric venues so I’m assuming the majority skipped the ecommerce shit and went straight to torrents for their downloads.
• This isn’t counting other digital sales avenues — did they put it on iTunes? That’s where most people are buying their digital music these days, not going direct to the artist’s website.
• I think putting such a low limit on what people could pay was a dopey idea. If we’re going to be dealing in intangible value, why not let consumers decide for themselves?
• Are there really that many FLAC users out there?

All in all I think it was a success even if they feel disheartened. Trent admits that he spent too much on the record. I’d be interested to know what the costs amounted to. I can’t even conceive of spending $40,000 on a record let’s say and having $100,000 left over would keep me in beer and guitar strings for another year or two.

That wasn’t too miserable. v0.06 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store is up with a pretty big overhaul:

• bsdds has its own shopping cart now instead of using paypal’s — should allow alternate payment methods
• zero dollar downloads
• buyer/downloader is now redirected to the download page post-transfer if PDT is turned on in paypal preferences)

The shopping cart needs some CSS love but that’ll have to wait as I got things to do.

Just uploaded a new version of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Two big changes:

• No longer requires Amazon S3. Your store files can be local and links will expire after your given duration (mod_rewrite required).
• Variable prices via text input. Previously variable prices could only be selected via a pre-defined list in the drop down. Now buyers can specify whatever they want as long as it’s more than zero.

Next stuff I’ll be adding:

• Integrate a shopping cart I wrote so that other payment options are possible (Google Checkout/VISA/etc).
• Handle zero dollar downloads.

Hooray for work!

Scott gives the lowdown on his pre-orders. Very awesome and open of him to give the numbers out. Looks like it was a pretty great success and huge congratulations to him.

I’ve been thinking about taking pre-orders for the next Brad Sucks album but I don’t think I have the energy or time or talent to set up a sweet system like Scott’s so I doubt I’ll bother. It’s hard enough getting the record out the door.

I’ve been working with David Huyck on some new Brad Sucks t-shirt designs. The first one is up in my shirt store:

Here are some of the shirt variations:

The crow on the left would rather be elsewhere.