Making Money From Your Music By Giving it Away

A band offered its CD free to an audience, and made four times as much money as they had when they sold it.

Derek Sivers, who founded (and recently sold) CD Baby, tells an interesting story on his blog about professional musicians offering their music for free – in order to sell it.

Instead of a band selling its CDs for $15 a piece at a concert, as it normally did, the band’s manager recommended that the band announce to the audience that the CD would be  free. The band ordinarily made about $300 a night from selling CDs at its shows.

This time, the manager urged the band to say this: “It’s really important to us that you have our CD. We worked so hard on it and are so proud of it, that we want you to have it, no matter what. Pay what you want, but even if you have no money, please take one tonight.”

And then one more time before the show ended: “Please, nobody leave here tonight without getting a copy of our CD. We’ve shared this great show together so it would mean a lot to us if you’d take one.”

“It changes the request from a commerical pitch to an emotional connection,” says Sivers.

As the story goes, the band was soon selling $1,200 worth of CDs per night, even though some people took it for free. The average price per CD came out to about $10.

Says Sivers: “Because every person left each show with a CD, they were more likely to remember who they saw, tell friends about it, listen to it later, and become an even bigger fan afterwards. Then, when the band came back to a town where they had insisted that everyone take a CD, attendance at those shows doubled! The people that took a CD became long-term fans and brought their friends to future shows.”

Sivers urges bands to try it and then report back on their success (or lack of it) to his blog here.

What’s interesting about the story is the way professionals approached the audience in much the same way amateur musicians do. Amateurs are, by definition, not in it for the money.

If this helps independent musicians who are not backed by or marketed by huge labels make a living, more power to them!

I would probably have bought the CD for something less than $15 if I hadn’t planned on getting it in the first place. If I had, I’d have paid the full amount. It sounds like most people had the same reaction.