downloads Archive
My Music Downloads - Some Stats!
I got sidetracked this morning, just now, and dug into the download and listening statistics for the music I have available on a pay-what-it’s-worth-to-you model.
Here’s the Top Ten, in order by total streaming listens and downloads:
- At This Moment: 329
- Icarus Wises Up: 318
- In The Afternoon: 271
- Second “Sister”: 245
- China Bay: 240
- Children’s Day: 207
- It Just Goes To Show: 194
- 1991 (PIGBAT version): 175
- Elvis C. (Running Erin version): 171
- Triple Bind Knot: 170
That’s a total of 2,244 downloads — and this is just the top ten! The number of times these songs were streamed is a tiny 76 — so almost thirty times as many people download the songs as stream them.
On the page for each song, I ask that people “consider contributing an amount proportional to how much you like these songs.” The recommended amount is a dollar. To date, since September of 2006, I have received contributions from three people totaling $60.00 ($57.35 net.) Thank you, Christopher Miller, Andrea Gideon, and Mur Lafferty.
Average income per song from 5,314 total downloads = a fraction over $0.01.
I should probably make clear that I’m not whining! My music, and especially making money from my music, is not the primary focus of this web site or my creative endeavors. I think this stuff is interesting because I like to play with numbers sometimes, and I also try to keep you guys in the loop when it comes to how close I am to being supported by my art. I’ll be doing the same thing with “Brave Men Run” income when I have something interesting to report on that front.
This is a sample of what one can expect if one, very casually and with little fanfare, gradually posts songs from an archive of music of variable fidelity and subjective quality. Honestly, the main reason I post my songs is so they’ll be someplace more or less safe… so it’s pretty awesome that all the songs I’ve posted so far exist on at least 30 and as many as 329 other hard drives!
What I’d like to know, and what is less easy to quantify, is how many people came to my site for the music and found other things, like “Brave Men Run.” I know that the 9th most popular song, “Elvis C.,” was featured on a couple of podcasts, most notably in a pivotal episode of Mur Lafferty’s “Heaven: Earth” podcast novel. I’ve played a couple of these on my own Sonitotum podcast, too. That’s a question for the peanut gallery: how many of you heard my music on a podcast, found it on a website or file-sharing network, and it led you here?
