Charting album sales/downloads from your own website?

Denalihighway

Wasn’t sure where to post this thread, didn’t really fit in techno section…feel free to move it.

I’m wondering if anyone knows about (or has first hand experience with) what steps to take (technical or otherwise) in order to chart album sales and downloads from your own website? This would be assuming you’ve set up your own label etc and that you’ve arranged distribution etc. There may be a multitude of other thing’s I’m overlooking but just looking for general info to start with and see if its worth doing.

Obviously the alternative is to be affiliated to the likes of Itunes/Vodafone/whoever and to use someone like Road Records for physical sales but it means you give a chunks o dosh to them which inevitably gets levied to the poor customer so you can’t sell it for as low a price as you may want to (unless you deliberately want to lose money, which is fine also)

Info on this seems to be thin enough on the ground – for obvious reasons the download sector won’t be too interested in helping you out on this one and I’ve looked around the net and poked some people’ brains without great success.

Or is it just not worth the hassle unless you’re selling a gazillion records? Yikes :eek:

miju

to submit sales data to chart track you need to register your company with them and conform to a certain technical and data collection criteria so it's not really in the bands best interest to sell from their own website and submit sales as the cost in setting up the system that chart track require can be quite costly (developer would charge approx €1,000 - €2,000)

however, my company have been working on something that will be a unqiue service and first in Irish music amongst other services we'll be offering and we'll be looking for bands to beta test this shortly.

included in this is the ability to sell their downloads from their websites / myspace and bebo and they will all be included in the official charts.

PM me if you want more info about chart track and the charts as i've plenty of knowledge about it

Denalihighway

cheers man
i will PM you for some finer points and thanks for the offer - just for the benefit of readers:

would this 1K-2K cost be just to register and set up a website that you already have to chart the purchases?

do you know how people who have done this have dealt with the distribution side of things at all? I would assume there are companies who deal with distribution alone for cost per unit or whatever?

miju

Denalihighway wrote: »

would this 1K-2K cost be just to register and set up a website that you already have to chart the purchases?

registering with chart track is free and dependent upon signing a contract. the main cost would come from developing the backend of a website to be able to meet their fairly strict requirements for reporting sales to them.

Denalihighway wrote: »

do you know how people who have done this have dealt with the distribution side of things at all? I would assume there are companies who deal with distribution alone for cost per unit or whatever?

i'm not sure what exactly your question is but theres literally hundreds of online distributors. one of the better ones for Ireland is a company called Sonikpollen. you pay a flat fee (something aroun the €50 mark if memory serves) and your MP3 is distributed to over 400 digital stores including all the main players.

you also get SMS short codes etc as well for that flat fee

Denalihighway

sorry I should have clarified, its distribution for physical sales I was talking about. I've heard of Sonikpollen for digital distribution alright but as I say i'd be trying to avoid being affiliated to the big digital providers to try and control the cost etc so it would be more your area of development i'd be interested in.

Again there's probably an endless amount of people you could outsource this to but maybe you or other people have used or heard of some good operators, ever so slightly off-topic albeit...:)

miju

ah i thought you were talking about digital distribution. but the costs would be somewhat similiar if you were looking to sell physical sales on your own website.

physical distribution is a different baby altogether though. TBH I think you might be looking at this arseways by writing off the digital aspect. you can make more profit from digital only releases to physical releases and thats before you start factoring in replication / duplication costs.

digital is where alot of bands are charting these days: to give you an example heres a quick out take from a chart track mid week report from some time back. you are better focusing on digital sales as trying to focus on physicals is too costly and will not really yield results.

furthermore, the traditional route in promoting physical sales can be used for digital sales with SMS codes etc which all count and people are alot more likely to buy digital than physical when it comes to a single as the table shows

Denalihighway

i'd be looking for both options to be honest - good jaysus i'd never write off anything digital! Quite the opposite but i think's its important to have the physical option as well.

I dont think cds are near as becoming as obsolete as poeple think they are in the medium term at least - so many people just like having it in their hand, bit o artwork, for the car etc, and also there are people who just dont have internet or broadband and it doesnt bother them in the slightest.

interesting chart feature there - who would have thought Kaiser Chief fans would be the most net friendly - obviously they're just old enough to have their credit cards while Mika buyers are techno-phobic parents runnin out to the shops for their little daughters

miju

that was the only report i had to hand. usually the digital sales are double the physical sales.