September Sales Stats

We finally received the statistics on Spotify streams for September so here’s what the split looks like.  

Let looks at Digital Vs Physical first.

Digital Revenues= 50%  / Physical Revenues= 50%. 

But if we look at profit (the cost of selling digital is much lower) we end up with:

Digital profit = 62% / Physical = 38%

Here’s a graph with the profit from direct digital sales from our site, CD’s, Vinyl, iTunes, Spotify and Amazon. As you’ll see, Spotify revenues aren’t that bad! Let’s see what October looks like before we come to any conclusions though! :)

Evil Surveys - Knowing Your Fans

We ran a survey recently in which we asked people who had purchased and / or downloaded our music to answer a few questions.

The purpose was to get to know our fanbase better, to try and understand how they had found us and what had motivated them to download and/or pay for our music. We also slipped in some questions to see where Spotify fits in with all of this. Here’s what we found out.

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1) Where did you find out about us?

Other: 36%

On a music blog: 32%

Music Industry or tech blog: 17%

From a Friend: 13%

Comment: We probably should have provided more choices here but we wanted to keep it simple. We think that a majority of the Others are Aaahh Records and other Creative Commons music related sites.

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2) Was that via a social network, by email or in person?

Directly from the blog / website: 59%

Other: 15%

In a real life conversation!: 11%

Twitter. 5%

Email: 3%

At a concert: 2%

Other social network: 2%

Google+: 1%

Facebook.  0%

Comment: It’s interesting to note that no one discovered us on Facebook. Facebook is a great place to interact with people when you already know them, but it seems that it’s probably not a great discovery tool.

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3. Did you listen to our music online before downloading it?

Yes: 89%

No: 11%

Comment: we didn’t ask if people thought they would have downloaded it without listening to it first. Perhaps we should have.

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4. If so, where did you listen to our music before downloading it?

Our website (bandcamp): 81%

Music Blog: 8%

Other: 8%

iTunes: 2%

Spotify: 1%

Deezer: 0%

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5. What made you decide to download the music?

I wanted to sample the music before buying a CD/Vinyl: 28%

I wanted to sample the music before paying for the MP3’s.: 22%

I wanted to own the music but couldn’t afford to pay for it: 22%

I don’t really know. I just clicked the buttons!: 19%

I wanted to own the music but I don’t think music is worth paying for: 4%

I wanted to write a review about your music: 3%

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6. Do you have any idea how many times you have listened to our album(s)?

More than 5 times: 45%

2-5 times: 30%

More than 50 times: 15%

Once: 7%

I have no idea: 3%

I didn’t even get past the first couple of songs, you guys suck! 0% (thankfully!)

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7. What made you decide to pay for our music? (multiple responses ok)

(Only people who had made a purchase were asked this question)

I wanted to support the band: 100%

I wanted to own the music: 61%

I wanted to own a tangible version of the album (CD/Vinyl): 61%

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8. Do you have a Spotify account?

No: 65%

Free Account: 31%

Unlimited Account (4.99): 2%

Premium Account (9.99): 2%

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9. Do you have any suggestions for us? 

1) Keep up the good work. :)

2) You guys are awesome! Suggestion: Come to America to tour :)

3) You guys are a pretty rad group and I really appreciate your enthusiasm at getting your music out there.

4) I didn’t recognize me in that survey : I discovered you with aaahh records. As I only listen to free music (ie under CC or Art Libre license), I download a lot, delete a lot too… and when I love an album I give some euros to the band or artist, but I can’t do that more than 4 or 5 times per month :-( … and it’s your time soon !! ;-)

5) Made me feel guilty that i haven’t paid so far:)

6) Put more songs into Rock Band, that’s where I first heard about you guys, the song was “roll over” and it made me check out more music by you guys!

7) Keep interacting with the fans just like you’re doing now!

8) stay as you are! your music is beautiful!!!!!!! :)

9)Keep product such a delightful music and come back to Paris!!! (Not at the International.)

10) it was me who filled out the wrong survey, i wrote that you’re great and that I bought the beautiful vinyl. sorry :) but you’re great!

11) congratulation ^_^

12) Keep up the good work! And thanks again for sending me the missing CD.Yes, I’m the annoying guy from Bordeaux. ;o)

13) Keep up the great work. I’ve turned some friends on to your music.

14) Keep making music

15) can you make more music! Love Storm eye and The black box.

16) Keep on rockin’ :)

17) I found you in Aaah Records

18) Keep doing that great work!

19) Keep on doing what you do! The pay what you want/can is a great example of creative ways to reduce piracy and still get paid for the music!

20) Just keep the good work! It is difficult to find really good music today and I was very pleased when I find your band.

21) give me cheese! some Roquefort would be good!

22) You are on Bandcamp (available worldwide) and were recommended by Frostclick. You are doing everything perfectly!

23) I usually dislike doing these surveys—but yours was short & to the point, so thank you.

24) Gregory and the Hawk

25) Keep it up mates!

26) Keep on, keeping on

27) Nahh

28) You guys are awesome, keep up the good work!

29) keep making music!!!

30) Great work. I wish more people knew about bandcamp.com

31) Keep up the great work!!! Come to NYC or Brooklyn!!!

32) Keep up the good work.

33) Do a show in NYC

34) like it!

35) Keep making great music guys!

36) do more music

37) keep it up, everything sounds great

38) May be it does exist ? French translation for my who don’t speak English

39) Fuck the majors!

40) Keep up the great work…

41) keep the good job

42) you’re great! i bought the beautiful vinyl. hope to see you live soon..

43) keep going guys - you are doing an excellent work

44) Don’t send out too many stupid evil surveys.

45) You really don’t need any !

46) Keep communicating the way you guys are doing.

We’ll let you draw your own conclusions!

How to set up your own Kickstarter site.

Kickstarter is great but if you’re not a US resident, you can’t use it to kickstart your creative projects. They’ll take money from anyone, anywhere in the world, but if you’re not an American, you can’t be part of their club. Maybe there are legal reasons for this but it still sucks!

There are alternatives like Indiegogo, RocketHub, Funded by Me and many others but one of the drawbacks is that your fans might not be that enthusiastic about registering for yet another web account to support you. On top of that, they all take a percentage (generally between 4 and 8%) of the funds you raise. And there’s also the fact that you’re sending your fans to a third party site, and that you don’t have full control over the look and feel. Last but not least, you have to submit your project to them, and they can refuse it if they don’t like the look of you! 

In comes IgnitionDeck. 

Early October, I talked to Christian, from Aaahh Records, about our plans for One City Per Second. He introduced me to Shawn, from Virtuous Giant, who was developing a crowdfunding plugin for WordPress.  I dropped him an email and explained what we planning.

They were using their own software to fund their project. For $39.99 (instead of $49.99) you were given access to the software before everyone else and lifetime updates, etc…

Here’s a short overview of the features listed on their site that were important to us.

1) Simple Paypal integration.

2) Social sharing (twitter/facebook) - it’s really easy to add those Like/Tweet buttons!

3) Mailing list support - it supports MailChimp and Aweber so you can import emails directly to a list of your choice. We use MailChimp so that was really cool. If you don’t use MailChimp, well, you should because it’s ace!

4) Unlimited Products - this was key for us because we wanted to be able to run multiple campaigns for different cities at the same time.

So we went ahead and purchased the plugin, a URL for the site, some hosting from OVH (a French hosting company), installed WordPress, and waited for the beta version of the plugin to become available.

When it was ready, Shawn installed the first version on our site, and we started working together. He provided some great advice about how to make use of the plugin and we were a great beta tester for them because we had a real life project for them to get their teeth into. Their documentation was easy to follow and it didn’t take long to configure it. There were a few bugs of course, but that’s all part of the process, and a small price to pay to be one of the first bands in the whole entire universe to have their very own crowdfunding website.

After a few weeks of real life bugs, just over a month after being introduced, we were ready to launch the site.

If you’re interested in setting up your own crowdfunding site, you won’t have to go through all of that though because the plugin is pretty much bug free now! :)

Here’s a summary of the steps.

1) Purchase the URL and hosting (or use the one you already have)

2) Install WordPress.

3) Buy the IgnitionDeck Plugin.

4) Install the IgnitionDeck Plugin.

5) Configure your site.

6) Add a campaign.

7) Raise some money for your project!

It looks like the IgnitionDeck plugin is going to be available at the pre-launch price of $39.99 for another 2 days, as their campaign ends 14th November. So go and grab it now, it’s well worth the investment!

Introducing One City Per Second

Touring is expensive. You need to put fuel in your car, plane tickets are not cheap, accommodation is expensive and traveling can be long and uncomfortable.

The venues you play in are businesses and therefore need to make a profit when they book a show. Tour managers and booking agents need to pay their bills as well, so a large portion of the money you pay for a concert ticket goes towards paying for accommodation, fuel, venues, tour managers and booking agents and very little really ends up in the musician’s pocket. Unless you’re U2 of course!

Setting up a tour can be really complicated as you need to find venues to play in on the way, and those venues need to be available on the dates you need to fill up your schedule. Some venues will pay a guaranteed minimum fee (if they think you can draw a large enough crowd) others will provide you a percentage of tickets, some won’t pay a cent. Some local promoters/venues will provide accommodation and catering, others don’t provide anything. So if the turn out is bad, you can lose a fair amount of money on the road paying for gas and accommodation.

We’re not saying that music venue owners, tour managers and booking agencies are to blame for this, but if we can remove them from the equation, and book shows directly with our fans, and fund them in advance to remove some of the risk, then we can reduce costs and organize things more efficiently.

This is why we set up One City Per Second. It’s a concert funding platform. We set up a funding campaign for a specific city based on the costs of getting there and any other fees related to booking a venue, hiring equipment, etc… Then we fix a date and deadline for funding the concert. People can fund the concert in at different levels (just by paying for a ticket, or by combining merchadise) and if we reach the target, we jump in the car, plane, train and play the gig and bring all the merch with us.

So if you’re interested in seeing us play live, just contact us and we’ll set up a funding campaign for your city. 

We’ve also launched a t-shirt funding campaign as well. You can read more about that here.

We hope to see you soon!

Cheers,

Uniform Motion

Hanging Out On Google+

Last week we organised a Hangout on Google+ to see if it could be a viable platform for streaming our hypnotic audio-visual experience!

Google+ hangouts are like video chats but they can host up to 10 participants and there are some advanced features such as screencasting and document sharing.

We set it up in the following way.

Renaud (our illustrator) shared his screen (where he was sketching on photoshop) in one window.

Olivier (drums, keyboards) and I (guitar, vocals) shared our webcam and audio. We used two static microphones and a mixing desk in order to improve the sound quality and just used the built-in webcam on Olivier’s Mac. 

We muted the sound output when we played to avoid feedback. Most people figured out fairly quickly that they could mute their own microphones but we could still see everyone on the screen. Silent clapping is kind of cute!

We made the hangout public so anyone could join in but you can do it by invite only. 

Each participant can choose which screen they want to display as the main screen so you can switch between the drawings and the musicians, and the other viewers.

People can use the chat window to interact with us while we play. 

At the end of the gig, we stayed and chatted with everyone for a while to ask them what they thought of the platform and the mini-concert concept. 

Everyone agreed that it was a really cool concept and that we should do more, which we will!

Someone made a video of one of the songs which will give you an idea of what the experience is like from a viewer’s perspective. The sound and video quality aren’t great. We’ll try and do a screen capture and record the audio straight out of the mixing desk next time!

Break Even Celebration

We said we’d lower the price of our physical products if we broke even. Well, here it is folks. You can name your price for our CD and Vinyl. Minimum price is 1 euro (plus shipping). Bandcamp won’t allow us to put zero. This is kind of an experiment. You can thank a lovely chap called Thierry who suggested the idea. 

Finance Friday #1

Hi everyone,

This could be the first of many posts containing financial tidbits, statistics and other more or less useful information, or it could be a one off. Time will tell.

This one could be a little controversial because we are going to talk about how generous people are in different countries!

As some of you may know, we allow people to download our music for free, or to pay for it.

Below you’ll find percentages for the top 10 countries where we sell our music. 33% means that 1 out of 3 people who download our music directly from us, who happen to live in Italy, pay for it.

Italy: 33%

Germany: 30%

Australia: 20%

Belgium: 20%

France: 18%

Spain: 17%

Canada: 16%

United Kingdom: 14%

United States: 14%

Brazil: 12%

Can we conclude that Italians and Germans are more generous than Brits and Americans?! 

Data, or lack thereof.

We received a few requests from some cheeky individuals asking us if our new high profile had translated into more plays, sales, etc… That got us thinking. 

We were thinking of posting some numbers to give people an idea of what a bit of internet buzz can do for your bank account and self esteem. So we started looking at the numbers.

But how exactly does one determine how big the increase is? Statistics can be used to say just about anything and there are many factors to be taken into consideration. For example. If I were to look at the numbers for the 12 months preceding the posting our little article  and then compare them to the ones we got for the month following the posting of the article, would that be a fair comparison? Some would say it’s unfair because we didn’t release a record during that period (our last album was released in February of 2010) and that the increase could just be from the album release.

Or should we compare the month of September to the numbers we had in June, July and August? Some would say it’s not a fair comparison because a lot of people were on holiday and September is when every goes back to school, work, etc…

But none of this is important if you don’t have access to the data in the first place.

So what do we have?

Uniform Motion Website. Thanks to Google Analytics, we know exactly how many visits we’re getting to our website in realtime. Check.

Plays on Bandcamp. Bandcamp provides realtime stats on that. Check.

Downloads on Bandcamp. Same thing. Check.

Sales on Bandcamp. Check.

Direct sales at gigs. No problem there.

What about iTunes?

Well, we actually get sales data from them every week. How many tracks/albums did we sell last week? Where were they sold? We have all that. Great! The money doesn’t come in for another 45 days, but the data is there. Wonderful. If we get a lot of sales in New Mexico, we can assume it would be wise to play a gig there someday. If we only sold one album there, maybe we could find a place to crash if we went there on holiday!

What about Spotify, aka the second single largest source of digital music revenue for labels in Europe?

Do we know how many streams we got last week? No.

What about last month? Nope.

What about the month before? No, no, no!

We have to wait 3 months for that information to come through.

Do we know where the music was played so we can plan our gigs accordingly? Nope. 

Perhaps this is not their fault but if we’re supposed to consider Spotify as a promotional tool, shouldn’t we have access to some more data? And up-to-date data? Surely the whiz-kids from Spotify can open up their API to aggregators so we can see how many plays we’re getting in realtime?  This should not be too much to ask. Deezer provides this kind of information. You see the number of streams and where the songs were played in realtime with Deezer. 

I realise that this looks like we’re picking on Spotify again, but because of them, we can’t publish our blogpost about how our high profile has affected our numbers until January! 

Remix Kits

We thought we’d set all the stems from our latest album free. The files are all under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. This means you can share your remix, and even sell it if you want as long as you state somewhere that the original work was made by Uniform Motion.

The BPM’s are in the SoundCloud set comments and all tracks have the same starting point, so when you import them into your DAW, they should all be in sync.

Aaahh Records, a lovely netlabel who released our debut album in 2010, ran a remix contest shortly after the album came out. We heard quite a few excellent remixes and really enjoyed it so we’re looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

There’s a condition though! You also have to remix the album artwork before you post your song online!

(Click ‘artwork’ in the previous sentence to download the HD PDF. By remix, we mean that you have to use at least one element of the original artwork in yours. ie: you use Photoshop to cut out a tree, or the Knight’s sword, or whatever.)

Let us know if you find anything weird in the tracks as exporting them can be tricky sometimes. Here are the Soundcloud Sets. You can go directly to SoundCloud to get them as well.

The Victory of Buckets and Doors Remix Kit by Uniform Motion Our Hearts Have Been Misplaced in a Secret Location Remix Kit. by Uniform Motion I Was Crushed by a Forty-Foot Man Remix Pack by Uniform Motion There is no Way There is no Way Remix Kit by Uniform Motion The Rats Dress Nice Remix Kit by Uniform Motion Fools, Don’t Listen to a Word I Say Remix Kit by Uniform Motion We’re Hauling Land Through the Air Remix Pack by Uniform Motion I Will Put My Life on Tape Remix Kit by Uniform Motion An Island Remix Pack by Uniform Motion