http://www.noisetrade.com
I've been looking into noisetrade.com for a while now, planning to use it as a way to help spread the word about my music whenever I finally got an album recorded. There was a one-time fee of $250 for an artist to register their album or demo with Noise Trade, which I was happy to find is now completely eliminated. Their reasoning was "we need to practice what we preach" -- as in giving away something for free with the idea that it will help spread the word faster. More about why they decided to eliminate the fee HERE.
Anyway, I am very excited, and I signed up a earlier this week with a bunch of demo songs (I figured since its free now, it was worth a shot now instead of waiting til I have a complete album). I didn't post my widget anywhere yet, I just wanted to see what would happen strictly through the site. The first day I got 1 new download of my demo, and every day since there has been about 1 new download, which means I now have 4 new fans/mailing list members, and 20 potential new fans, just from signing up with Noise Trade! (Not bad I say) Today was the first day I didn't get any new downloads/fans, which I kind of expected since there doesn't seem to be an easy way to search by genre or really by anything right now--There is just an alphabetical listing and a "most recent" listing, so new albums seem to get buried within a few days, unless their name starts with and "A". Not too smart really, but since Noise Trade is new to the Free Signups, I suspect they will start upgrading their search options as they start to get a lot more sign ups. That said, I'm sure it would help if I tried to advertise my widget myself, but I think I might save that effort for my real album...we'll see ;-) Either way, it seems to me that even though this service is still somewhat in the beginning stages (1 year old so far), it can be a very valuable tool to help artists gain more fans the old-fashioned way -- by word of mouth! I wish I had an album ready now, because I think this is probably the prime time to get signed up, while there are not a ton of other artists yet to get buried under!
Just for fun, here's the widget for the demo I posted on Noise Trade:
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UPDATE: Didn't go so well for me...A slow stream of people seemed to download my demo, but the most important thing to me was to gather their email info for my mailing list, and hopefully they'd actually email 5 of their friends to tell them about the demo as well. I thought it would be understood to downloaders that when they entered their email they were agreeing to join my mailing list, especially because I personally stated this above each widget, but on the actual NoiseTrade site this was not an option. When I entered the gathered emails into my mailing list (reverbnation, which asks subscribers to confirm) I was disappointed that some people seemed confused, as if I was spamming them or they had been tricked into something. 2 people even marked the confirmation emails as spam, and that had never happened before. I think NoiseTrade just didn't do quite a good enough job explaining what happens with the email addresses...or they should allow more customization on their site so that I could have posted some sort of disclaimer myself. Overall, I guess it did help me to gain a few new fans that I wouldn't have had, but it made me feel uncertain whether I could actually email people without upsetting them.
ReplyDeleteAnywho, I stopped using NoiseTrade altogether, since they seem to have dropped the whole idea of telling 5 friends and simply made it into "give your email and download the songs," which I don't need because I could just do that through Reverbnation or my site anyway. As far as simply gathering email addresses goes, I've decided through much trial and error that its much easier to gather email addresses directly through whatever management system I'm using (such as Reverbnation). That way, I know that anyone who signed up, MEANT to sign up.