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

The Play to Pay Ratio

It looks like our accounting insights have more appeal than our music does, so we’re going to give the people what they want and go into a bit more detail!

We’ll be forever known as Uniform Motion, a promising indie band who gave up music for a career in accounting! Maybe they’ll add a new ‘Accounting’ category at the grammys and we’ll win it!

Just so everyone knows what we’re talking about, we released our new album One Frame Per Second, September 1st 2011, and wrote a short article on our blog detailing how much we would make from the various packages on offer (CD, Vinyl, PlayButton, Digital) and from a few of the digital music stores and streaming services. 

We didn’t mention how much it cost us to record the album, as we had recently written a post called ‘How to make a record on a low budget’ which laid down the costs associated with recording our music.

So let’s get to it.

Digital downloads.

We told you how much we earn when someone chooses to pay 5 euros ($7) for the digital download version of our album.

However, the average price people pay is actually 2.82 euro ($3.95) which leaves us with 2.21 euros ($3.09) after Paypal and Bandcamp fees.

The highest price anyone has ever chosen to pay is 20 euros ($28). The lowest is 0.50 euros ($0.70).

The key word here is ‘choose’ though. And that’s where it gets interesting. We did the math(s) and we found that for every 10 people who download our music for free (who choose to pay 0) 1 person will choose to purchase something from us (a CD, a Vinyl or Digital). 

Bandcamp also allows people to listen to all the songs on the album before they download them.

We found that for every 100 songs that were listened to on our bandcamp page, 1 person would purchase something from us. Funnily enough, this ties in with the number of visits to our website. For every 100 visits to our website, 1 person purchases our music. 

We are only talking about what happens in our own backyard here. We have no idea how many downloads of our music occur outside of bandcamp on filesharing sites. We can make an educated guess based on how many last.fm listeners we have but it would still be a guess.

Average price across all packages.

We offer different packages for our music ranging from CD’s, to Poster Packs (posters + download), to Vinyl, to PlayButtons, with prices ranging from 0 to 25 euro ($35). The average price we’ve been getting is 8.8 euros ($12.32) or 6.88 euros ($9.63) once bandcamp and Paypal have taken their share.

About 20% of our revenues come from digital downloads, 80% from physical packages. 

So if we factor in the costs of making the physical product, the average profit we get per purchase is roughly 4.68 euros ($6.55).

On average, to break even (recoup our production costs) we need 641 people to purchase something from us at that average price. Based on our ratio of 100 website visitors/song plays to 1 purchase, that means we would need 64,100 visitors, or songs to be listened to. Full disclosure - we’re probably not going to recoup this time round, but we are confident for the future.

Here’s why.

We’ve released 1 album per year since 2009. Each year, we double the number of visits to our website and the number of people who buy our music doubles as well.  In the interest of simplicity, I’m going to call the average purchase of 4.68 euros a ‘copy’. The concept of selling copies is still engraved in people’s heads so I think it will make more sense to explain it this way, but in reality, it’s an average amount per transaction.

2009 - 1st album: we sold 118 copies.

2010 - 2nd album: we sold 282 copies.

2011 - 3rd album: we’ve sold 225 copies so far. So reaching 564 copies is definitely possible. We may even reach 641 and break even this time. Who knows.

Let’s be conservative and say we will sell 500 copies.

So how long will it take us to reach a level that would allow us to quit our day jobs?

If we continue doubling our sales every year, surprisingly, it shouldn’t take too long! Well, that depends on how patient you are I suppose!

2012- 4th album: 1000 copies.  We break even and make a profit of 1,680 euros ($2,352)

2013- 5th album: 2,000 copies. We break even and make a profit of 6,260 euros ($8,904) 

2014 - 6th album: 4,000 copies. We break even and make a profit of 15,720 euros ($22,008)

2015 - 7th album: 8,000 copies. We break even and make a profit of 34,440 euros ($48,216)

2016 - 8th album: 16,000 copies. We break even and make a profit of 71,880 euros ($100,632)

2017 - 9th album: 32,000 copies. We break even and make a profit of 146,572 euros ($205,202)

2018 - 10th album: 64,000 copies. We break even and make a profit of 296,520 euros ($415,128)    

This is of course utter nonsense, just the rambling prose of an overly optimistic DIY musician! What I think it illustrates though, is that Rome wasn’t built in a day. The secret to success is perseverance. You just have to keep at it while controlling your costs and (trying to) make good quality music.

I’ll post our sales numbers every year for the next 7 years! We’ll see how it goes! 

Clarifications.

It seems rather ironic that we got ten times more hits to our website yesterday than usual following an article we wrote about the economics of a DIY album release. Hundreds of people visiting our website the day we release our album just to see how much we would earn if someone actually bought it. We are grateful for the attention though.

We only wanted to provide our fans with the facts so that they knew how to best support us based on their music consumption preferences. 

Since the article seems to have gone on a journey around the Twitterland, we thought we should clarify a few things.

First of all, the blogpost was not an attack on Spotify. We don’t have a problem with the concept of streaming music services at all. What we dislike about Spotify, is the lack of transparency in their business model. With Apple, it’s simple. They take 30%. With Spotify, we don’t know if we’re getting a fair deal or not.

With that being said, I personally know people who listen to our music on Spotify and who have purchased a CD, a 12” Vinyl or a PlayButton from us.

So Spotify is not the devil but unless they clarify the situation, I think a lot of independent bands will end up removing their music from the service. 

I read a few comments about things that were missing such as information on eMusic. The album hadn’t been released on eMusic when I wrote the original article but it’s there now so I’ve added eMusic to the original blogpost. We’ve been getting $0.26 per song, or $2.60/album (with 9 tracks) from eMusic.  I don’t have any information on MOG, rdio or Pandora, I don’t even think our music is on there. You need to have a physical CD for sale on Amazon to get your music on Pandora apparently. Maybe one day, we’ll get around to taking care of that!

Someone else mentioned that you can get your CD’s into record stores the DIY way, without a label. Well, we have actually been there and done that and come home without the t-shirt! Directly with a record store and via an indie distributor. It worked but we never got paid!!! Yes, that’s right. They sold our CD’s and kept the money. We could sue them of course. But it would cost more in lawyer’s fees than the amounts they owe us!

Someone mentioned songwriter royalties. We write all of own songs and signed with PRS for Music in the UK several years ago.

We know our music has been played on the radio, on TV, and on various streaming services who are supposed to be paying royalties for this.

We have never received a single dollar or euro, or even a rupee from PRS! Maybe the reason for this is hidden in this article about the Spanish equivalent of PRS.

I saw a comment about how we were paying too much for CD’s! We make 100 CD’s at a time, which is why they cost a little more per unit than when you press 1,000. Remember we’re a micro band, we sell a few hundred CD’s. Why make a thousand when you will only sell a few hundred? It’s a waste of money and plastic!

It’s cool to see how passionate people feel about music and we’re proud to have sparked off a few debates. Our intentions were much more humble.

However, we don’t want to be one of those bands people have heard of for all the wrong reasons. We’d much rather people talked about our music instead!

Thanks,

Uniform Motion

Release day economics

Update with 2011 numbers available here.

Our new record was ‘officially’ released today. This means that you’ll find the digital version on various different Digital music stores like iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic, and you’ll be able to stream the music from services such as Spotify and Deezer.

The physical versions (CD and Vinyl) are only available from our Bandcamp site and at gigs. 

Unfortunately, you will not find our record in any record stores. The reason for this is because we do not have a record label, which means we have no access to distribution. Without a distributor, you cannot sell your CD’s in record stores. If you work for a distributor and you’re interested in carrying our CD or Vinyl, or both, feel free to contact us! 

If you choose to purchase our music or use one of the ‘legal’ streaming services, here’s an overview of where the pennies go. 

SPOTIFY: 

With Spotify, we’ll get 0.003 EUR/play. 

If you listen to the album all the way through, we’ll get 0.029 EUR.

If you listen to the album 10 times on Spotify, we’ll get 0.29 EUR

If you listen to it a hundred times, we’ll get 2.94 EUR

If you listen to the album 1,000 times (once a day for 3 years!) we’ll get 29.47 EUR!

If you use the free version of Spotify, it won’t cost you anything. Spotify will make money from ads. If you use any of the paid versions, we have no idea how they carve up the money. They only disclose this information to the Major record labels…

DEEZER:

Deezer seems to pay a little more.

We’ve been getting 0.006 EUR/play from them. That’s 0.052 EUR/album play. If you listen to the album 10 times on Deezer, we’ll get 0.52 EUR. If you listen to it a hundred times, we’ll get 5.2 EUR. If you listen to the album 1,000 times (once a day for 3 years!) we’ll get a whopping 52 EUR! 

If you use the free version of Deezer, it won’t cost you anything and Deezer will make money from the ads. If you use any of the paid versions, we have no idea how they carve up the money either.

eMUSIC:

eMusic is a subscription service. The cost of the album will depend on the plan you have. We get roughly $0.29/song or $2.60/album (9 songs).

AMAZON MP3:

You’ll pay 7.11 EUR to download the MP3’s. We will get 4.97 EUR of that. That’s a 70-30 split.

iTUNES:

The album will cost you 8.91 EUR to buy from Apple.

There’s a 70-30% split there too, so we will keep 6.28 EUR/album.

That being said, it costs us 35 EUR/year to keep an album on iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon (105 EUR per year for all 3 of our albums!) so we don’t make any money until 24 people have bought a digital copy of the album on iTunes, or 150 single songs, or if we get tens of thousands of listens on Spotify! In most cases, it’s actually more economically viable not to sell the music at all.

But what about if you buy the Digital version directly from us?

DIGITAL:

We allow people to pay what they want for the digital version. If you choose to pay 5 EUR, Paypal takes 0.37 EUR, Bandcamp takes 0.75 EUR. Uniform Motion keeps 3.88 EUR. it doesn’t cost us anything to have a page on bandcamp.

If you decide to pay nothing, well, we get nothing, but at least you didn’t give money indirectly to major record labels, which seems to be the case with Spotify!!

CD: 

If you buy a CD, directly from us for 10 EUR, Paypal takes 0.515 EUR, Bandcamp takes 1.5 EUR. So there’s slightly less than 8 EUR left for us. But hold on a second, it costs a fair bit to make the CD.

The CD itself costs 1.2 EUR, the booklet costs about 50 cents, the CD packaging is 1.8 EUR and the sticker on the front costs 35 cents.

That’s a total of 3.65 EUR

So in reality, there’s 4.34 EUR left for us.

VINYL:

If you buy a 12” Vinyl from us at 15 EUR, Bandcamp takes 2.25 EUR, Paypal takes 0.646 EUR so there’s 12.10 left. The cost of the Vinyl itself is 3.06 EUR

The labels cost 1.3 EUR. For a total of 4.36 EUR

So there’s 7.75 EUR left for us.

However, we had to press 250 of these (because that’s the minimum order), so it’s very unlikely we’ll make any money on them.

We need to sell 72 copies before we break even on the vinyl edition. We’ve sold about 30 so far.

If we break even, we’ll lower the price a little bit. :)

EDIT (14th Sept 2011) 

A few people have asked about the Vinyl numbers. Those numbers can be a bit confusing so here’s some more information on that.

We ordered 250 copies because that’s the minimum order for vinyl (the lowest quantity we could find at least). To keep costs down, we decided to go for a white sleeve with no artwork on it, and personalise the sleeves by putting custom stickers on them. There’s a sticker on the front with the name of the album on it. And we decided to put one on the back for the first 50 orders with the fans’ names on them.

250 copies cost us 775 €.

Black vinyl, full colour biscuit (Side1, Side2) White discosleeve.

That’s 3.1 EUR/copy.

The front sticker cost 0.60 EUR.

The one on the back cost 0.70 EUR.

The numbers look strange because we didn’t order 250 stickers. We’ll order more if we sell enough copies of the record, but if we’re only going to sell 50 or 100, why order more than we can sell? We didn’t have a choice with the vinyl itself, but we did with the stickers. So we only ordered 75 front stickers and 50 personalised ones. But my numbers were based on 75 of each.

775 + 45 (0.6 X 75) + 52.5 (0.7 X 75) = 872.5 EUR

872.5 / 12.1 (net price for each copy) = 72.107

So that’s where the number 72 came from. It should probably really have been 73 copies to really break even! But hey, I’m a musician, not an accountant! :)

What is the meaning of this?

I keep hearing that if you want to get people’s attention, especially the attention of bloggers and journalists, then you need a story. Otherwise, they’ll ignore you and no one will ever find out about how cool your music is. I think a lot of people don’t really care what your story is. They’re into the music and that’s enough.

On top of that, we don’t really have a story. We’re just a bunch of normal guys, doing normal stuff like playing underwater chess and knitting outfits for our chihuahua’s.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t give you one! It just happens that our latest album, One Frame Per Second, is based on a true story.

The Story of Little Knight, starting off in life with the kind perils one would expect of a young knight. He gets attacked by a giant; his childhood sweetheart, the Princess, gets kidnapped and he must face his biggest fears in order to save her.

One Frame Per Second details all the hazards the Little Knight faces.

The Little Night begins his journey by going back in time, (not literally of course, that would be impossible!) remembering the first encounter with his noble lady, reminded of how they used to pick apples together and play tricks on wizards at Magic School by placing buckets of sludge above the door.

Nostalgia encourages him to go back to his roots and he reminisces about the innocence of childhood, walking the streets he grew up on, reliving the events that forged his character. This provides him with the strength he needs to embark on his quest.

He sets sail and quickly finds the Forty-Foot man who stole his beloved living a cozy life on an island nearby. As most of you probably know, fighting a man 7 times taller than you is not an easy task. He gets beaten up of course but vows to never give up and swears he we will find a way to free the Princess.

The islanders, who have been oppressed by the giant for centuries, are so impressed by the bravery of the young lad that they start to follow him wherever he goes, treating him like a messiah. We’re all used to seeing crowds of people standing, and staring, and acting silly, but when they follow you around like idiots, you have to do something about it! So he flees to the nearby mountains and camps there for a while.

He comes across the devil during his stay, who offers him weapons and magic powers so he can defeat the giant, in exchange for his soul of course. Selling one’s soul to the devil for a sword and some magic beans is a small price to pay for a princess, he thinks, so he swiftly shakes on it.

He returns to the Island to find the giant in chains. The islanders, so inspired by the courage of the Little Knight, worked together to defeat the tall ogre during the Knight’s absence.

The Little Knight is obviously a little pissed off about this. He figures that the devil had probably been aware of this fact when he swapped the weapons and magic for his soul. Bloody devils, you can’t trust any of them!

To add insult to injury, he learns that the Princess had been freed by the giant long before the islanders had defeated him. It appears that he had grown tired of her and put her on a boat, blindfolded, a few days before the young knight had arrived on the island and confronted the giant for the first time. Why on earth did that rude giant not say so in the first place?

Thinking to himself the magic may not be wasted, the Little Knight places the sword in the ground and uses the magic to ensure it doesn’t budge. He attaches some rope to it, and to himself, and magically flies off the find the Princess.

A few days later, the rope drops to the ground, as if it had been cut at the other end. The islanders pull on the rope for days, until the end of it reaches them. Attached to the other end of the rope, they find a small bottle. In the bottle, they find a small box. In the small box they find a note. In the note, they find some words.