Great news! The new album, “Off the Edge”, has finally started converting into full album sales. We’re absolutely thrilled, and it’s easily one of the highlights of this month’s news.
First and foremost, we’d like to thank everyone who has taken the plunge and purchased a copy. In an era where singles often dominate the music landscape, choosing to invest in a full album means a great deal to us. That’s why we worked hard to ensure that “Off the Edge” delivers real value from start to finish and is worth every cent of its $15.99 price tag.
Realistically, it took three tracks before people really started taking notice, but the album is much more than the sum of its individual songs. As a complete body of work, the tracks complement each other and tell a much bigger story.
Lipcrack plans to release one more track, and once that’s finalized we’ll begin sharing short previews of the remaining songs. Not only will this give listeners a better feel for the album as a whole, but it will also provide a fair glimpse of what they’re getting before deciding to purchase the complete record.
Once again, thank you for your support. Every album sale helps keep the music alive.
As a result, we also received our first comment on the website, and that meant a lot to us. Throughout this journey we’ve often been advised to make the site more social and interactive, but when nobody is posting anything, it’s easy to start wondering whether the effort is worthwhile. Most of the feedback we receive is delivered to us straight through email.
Of course, opening up a comments section is a double-edged sword. Along with genuine engagement comes the possibility of criticism, and I’ve seen enough band pages over the years to know that negative comments are simply part of putting yourself out there.
Oddly enough, though, most of the feedback we’re currently receiving has been coming through promotion agencies rather than directly through the website, which brings me to the next update.
I’m fairly sure I mentioned last month that we were going to try and boost our Spotify numbers. When you’re starting with an engaged audience of virtually zero, you’d think finding a few listeners wouldn’t be too difficult. We did manage to get onto some playlists and picked up a handful of plays from listeners, which was encouraging, but in the meantime I was also being bombarded with Facebook ads promising to improve our Spotify numbers.
Curiosity eventually got the better of me, so I decided to put some of these services to the test. Some create advertising campaigns on your behalf, while others offer access to playlist curators who review your music for a fee. The interesting part is that many of these curators provide feedback on your tracks.
So far, most of the feedback has actually been quite positive. The catch is that it often ends with something along the lines of, “We enjoyed the track, but here’s why we’re not adding it to our playlist,” and you still have to pay for that.
It’s been an interesting process because, while a playlist placement would obviously be the ideal outcome, the feedback itself has provided a valuable insight into how different curators listen to and evaluate music.
With all that said, I finally tested a service that delivered the kind of results I had been looking for although there are still plenty of others out there to try for a fee.
I’ve included the results because they provide what I think is a realistic glimpse into the potential for growing an audience on Spotify, provided you’re prepared to invest some money into promotion.
At the time of writing, we’ve reached 1,900 listeners, generated 7,700 streams, and, perhaps most importantly, received 474 saves. The saves are particularly encouraging because they indicate that people are returning to the track and listening more than once. For any artist, that’s a strong sign that the music is connecting with listeners rather than simply being played and forgotten.
The world map has also provided some fascinating insights into where our audience is located. For the first time, we’ve started gaining traction in Brazil where the track has attracted a noticeable amount of attention. Seeing listeners emerge from entirely new parts of the world is one of the more rewarding aspects of the whole process and a reminder of just how far music can travel.
For this particular test, I chose to use “Fucked Up My Life.” The main reason was that I hadn’t really promoted the track to my email lists, so it seemed like a good opportunity to see how it would perform on its own merits.
The results were encouraging enough, but I’ll probably use “Demolition Man” for future tests. At the moment, however, we’re still waiting for “Skullen” to clear the distributor process and make its way onto Spotify. Once that happens, it’ll be interesting to see how it performs alongside the other releases and whether it responds similarly to promotion. I’m going to briefly add a personal opinion here, I believe that paid for promotion only lasted about 3 days then I gather it was ended. I have not been able to get a response from the company responsible despite the fact that there is mention on their website of support.
Now, I probably don’t need to say this, but in the wider context of Spotify, my current figures are relatively small. To generate what would equate to even a minimum wage income in the United States, you’d be looking at roughly 340,000 streams a month and only a small percentage of artists ever reach that level.
In reality, the difference between where Lipcrack is currently sitting and a band achieving, say, 48,000 listeners a month isn’t as dramatic as it might sound due to the small monetary compensation some .003 cents per stream. In many ways, most independent artists exist within the same broad space: building audiences, testing strategies, and trying to gain traction on a platform where visibility is highly competitive.
I know last month I mentioned that being placed on around 20 playlists could start to make a noticeable impact. But when I looked more closely at the numbers and the actual costs involved, the scale changes dramatically. To even come close to something like 340,000 streams, you’d realistically need exposure across thousands of playlists around 3,000 by some estimates.
At that level, one of the services I looked into suggested costs of roughly $16,000 AUD. In a label backed environment with a proper marketing budget, that might not be unusual. But for independent artists, it highlights a more uncomfortable reality: even when you do everything “right,” there are still no guarantees.
So without sounding too pessimistic, there’s a lingering truth that’s hard to ignore. You can write strong songs, invest in promotion, and still not break through in any meaningful way not necessarily because of the quality of the music, but because of how the system operates. Which brings me back to one of the recurring themes running through Lipcrack’s music, the chaos in the system which you’ll hear more of in our future tracks, because when you analyze everything, the numbers, the playlists, the marketing tests, and the constant guessing about what might or might not work that’s ultimately what it feels like. There’s structure to it, there are strategies, and there are services you can pay for, but there’s also a level of unpredictability that never really goes away and all you can do is try to enjoy the process one step at a time whether it leads anywhere or not.
That said, the one piece of information that surprised me, if you engage in this activity, if you’re not making 1000 listeners a year on Spotify, the royalties you would make get reinvested back into the system and paid to the artists that are making scale. At least that’s the information I walked away with the last reading on the numbers in Spotify playlist payments, that definitely has an unfair feel to it.
Thanks for staying with us, we’ll continue our testing of a few services over the next few months but unless there’s some significant movement, we most likely won’t report it because it’s not worth mentioning.
Lipcrack