Harvey Danger releases their album as a free digital download...nice!Harvey Danger hit gold with “FlagPole Sitta” in 1998, had less success with their 2000 release, was then dropped by their label, and broke up. Now they’re back sans label, experimenting with a promotion strategy including a free digital download of their latest album, Little By Little, on its website and as a BitTorrent.
Check out the financials, according to the Wall Street Journal:
According to Mr. Lin, Harvey Danger spent less than $50,000 on "Little by Little…" Recording the album cost about $30,000; having a distributor print 5,000 physical CDs cost nearly $9,000; and the bills for promotion to college radio and a publicist's services were around $4,000. In return for a share of royalties, friends helped the band design its Web site and ensure it could handle repeated 47.4-megabyte downloads; Mr. Lin says server and bandwidth costs are running about $200 a month.
More than 92,000 people have downloaded the album so far, 600 of which donated about $5-$10 to the band via PayPal. Roughly 2000-3000 CDs have been sold so far, of a 5000 CD print run. That’s phenomenal, for a band previously determined defunct.
According to the band:
We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record. … If the worst thing that happens is a whole bunch of people hear Little By Little… and no one buys it, we’ll know our experiment was costly. But that won’t make it a failure.
Related Links:
* Harvey Danger explain the philosophy and strategy behind the decision here.
* You can download the full album here.
* Harvey Danger's MySpace site is here.
* More details and comments in the Wall Street Journal article.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment