8 Goals for 2010
It’s good to have goals. I’ve been told that all up and coming bands, whatever that means, need to set themselves tangible objectives.
So I thought I would draw up a list. So here it is.
1) Break even.
We’ve spent a lot of money on this project so far and would really like to see some results this year.
We have 5,237 EUR to go, before we break even, although I’m sure we’ll have to fork out some more before the end of the year. For anyone who’s wondering, 5,237 EUR is the equivalent of 1,047 album sales for us.
2) Play several capital cities
We’ve already played Berlin and Paris and we’ll most likely be playing in Lisbon later this year. It would be cool to add London, Dublin, Belfast, Brussels, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Rome. Not too bothered about Washington DC, but we’d love to play in the States!
3) Play at least one major European festival
We almost made it to Printemps de Bourges this year, but I would really like to play Primavera. You never know!
4) 500 subscribers on our mailing list.
We started our mailing list recently and already have almost 200 people on it. Most of them subscribed when they downloaded our debut album for free. The ones who download using Mailinator addresses really piss me off though! Is it really too much to ask to exchange a valid email address for an album?
5) 500 facebook fans.
We have 123 today fans on facebook today. Facebook is an excellent platform for communicating with fans, selecting which ones you send updates to depending on their location, etc… We have almost 5,000 friends on MySpace, but MySpace is losing its purpose and a majority of those ‘friends’ are other bands. We need to drive more people to facebook.
6) 2,000 listeners on last.fm.
We have 951 listeners on last.fm today. Although having loads of listeners on last.fm does not really mean much, it is an indicator of how popular your music is.
7) >100 visits/day to our website.
On average, we had 77 visits/day to our website for the month of February, which isn’t bad, but with all the content we have up on our site, it would be a shame not to drive traffic to it. Also, the more sales we make directly, the more email addresses we pick up, and the less money we give to Apple, Spotify, etc…
8) Review on Pitchfork.
One mustn’t kid oneself. The best way to ‘make it’ in today’s indie music world is to get a review on Pitchfork, preferably with a rating of over 8/10. I have no idea how to make this happen, but I’ve noticed they have reviewed (and quite favorably) bands like The Antlers, whose album was originally released independently in early 2009 by the band, and ended up on Pitchfork several months later. So who knows?
We’ve had some good reviews and mentions on blogs like Puddlegum, CMJ.com and Seattle’s The Stranger but none of these have driven any considerable traffic to our website.
Other notable blogs we would like to see a review on are Stereogum, You Ain’t No Picasso and My Old Kentucky Blog. Oh, and I mustn’t forget Gorilla vs Bear!
Is there anything else we should be working on?
