I'm a person who keeps pretty good track of my Internet hits from all my sources on the Internet and I wanted to share some of them with you.
On my ReverbNation site it shows that I'm #1 on the Charts for Christian Music in the Seattle/Tacoma area, out of 53 artists. My states show I have 644 fans, 2563 Song Plays, 68 video plays and 8359 widget hits. If you don't know what a widget is that's okay. Now ReverbNation pays artists for the streaming of the artist's songs on their web site and so far I've racked up a total of $0.24.
Now I started distributing my Cd's through Cdbaby.com in 2006 and currently have 5 Cd's on their site. They distribute those CD's, both physical and mp3's through Amazon.com, iTunes, Rhapsody.com, Napster.com and a whole bunch of others. That comes to roughly 70 mp3's on a whole bunch of web sites out there. In 4 years my grand total of revenue is $140.79. There's a site called Spofity and it's not available in the U.S. They stream my songs and each time they do I get $0.00030000 per stream and it shows up on my account that way. I won't know what I'll get for my Internet radio plays that are on radio stations until,.. maybe the summer of 2011.
I have a very informative book that I wrote called The Songwriter's Guide to Submitting a Demo which is available on LuLu.com and to date my total with them is $23.79.
If you Googled my name "Jerry Corelli" with quotation marks you'll get a little over 11,000 hits and most of them will take you to a real site where my music is at or being played or sampled. I've discovered that daily there are about 3 to 4 searches using "Jerry Corelli", "Jerry Corelli Music" and so on. I've discovered many sites that have been around for awhile that have 5,000 to 10,000 song plays of my songs but I haven't seen any revenue and have discovered that the chances are great I never will. In fact there are programs that allow you to record or download music and video easily without paying for it. So all those hits and streams look great but no one is paying for my copyrighted music. Well, there are a few that are so I shouldn't say no one.
It's a funny thing too. I get a lot of emails from fans who tell me how much they enjoy my music but from what I see few or none of them are downloading or buying any CD's off the Internet. I only have basic tracking data provided by Google which starts in May of 2010 and shows my largest hits are the U.S., then the United Kingdom, Denmark, Canada, South Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Luxembourg, India, and bringing up the rear is Uganda. After totaling up all the hits on every site I have that counts hits like, Myspace, Shoutlife, YouTube and so on the total is close to 100,000 hits. So why isn't anyone downloading mp3's singly or the whole CD and why aren't they buying the physical CD's on the Internet? Is it the economy? Is it that my music isn't worth buying?
Over the years of singing at fairs, churches, coffee houses, etc, I've done very well with selling CD's at gigs. I've come to learn that when it comes to making money with my music it's the live gigs where I'll make any return on the expense of recording and packaging my music through the sale of my CD's. I've had one person after another come up to the CD table to buy a CD or 2 or 3 and ask why they've never heard me on the radio. As I was singing "I Can't Believe I'm Yours" at the Seattle Center I noticed a woman rushing over to our CD table to buy the CD that had that song on it.
Then it hit me, as I looked over the states. The majority of listeners, 80%, who both listen to my music and visit my sites are between 45-65. The fact is that, that age group, doesn't buy on line. Not because they don't want to necessarily but because they don't really know how or understand the whole process. It can sometimes confuse me. I've even gotten emails from fans who want to buy one or more of my CD's and tell me they aren't able to buy them on line. Even though they've gone to CDbaby, iTunes or the other sites. For some reason the process is too complicated. I believe it's a generational thing. It's common to see people 45 and younger walking around with there ipods with music they've downloaded but it's not common to see that with an older generation. For example, I write and record, publish and sell music and I don't have an ipod to listen to mp3's.
In conclusion, I guess the reason for this post was to vent. If anyone out there thinks the majority or minority of independent Christian Artists are making a living from our CD and mp3 sales on the Internet, we're not. At least I'm not. I would like to ask one thing of you if you are following this my web site, or blog, and that is if you could sign up as a follower. You'll see the info on the left side of this page and it's real easy. Also feel free to post comments regarding posts I've made.
Thanks and God Bless.
No comments:
Post a Comment