Selling Music Online

Donation based music downloads or the “you choose the price” online music distribution system is a good idea in theory. It makes your music available to everyone on the internet, even people without credit cards, it makes you seem generous, and it still provides you with a chance of being paid for your music. Unfortunately, that chance of being paid is almost non existent in most cases.

Yes, bands like Radiohead have done well with this method of selling music online, but they are a special case. They already had millions of devoted fans (including me) waiting for them to release another album. And when they released it in this relatively unique fashion, it created a huge internet buzz that promoted their music even further. It made everyone talk about online music distribution and whats wrong with the industry and all that. So Radiohead ended up letting people choose what to pay for their album and got tons of their fans to throw them a few dollars. They didn’t have to go through all the normal music promotion stuff regular record label bands do, they created their own promotion online.

Radiohead made it work (and then released a physical copy of the album, along with a special discbox thing, equaling lots of money) but this doesn’t mean your average unknown band or musician can make money online selling their music like this. In fact, you should probably just forget about this method. Even other  popular bands have had trouble with this kind of online music distribution. For someone without millions of fans, its not going to make you money.

I tried this idea out for a while, and after 100 downloads of one of my albums not a single person had donated anything. I know that may be a small sample size but its enough to see how ineffective donation based music downloads are for making money online. While it failed to make me even a cent, it makes sense (get it?) why it did not.

People don’t want to take the time to enter in their credit card info or fill out anything if they don’t have to. Thats enough to keep probably 95% of them from paying anything right there. If it was as simple as pulling some change out of their pocket and giving it to a musician they might, but bringing their credit card into the equation is not going to happen. This is the main problem with donation based downloads.

There is also the obvious problem that people are not generous, especially when it comes to purchasing music. Most people are not going to pay for something if you give them the option of not paying for it, and I cant blame them.

There are a few ways you can improve the chances of donation based downloads for selling music online. Don’t just stick a PayPal button near the downloading button, make them go through PayPal and enter $0 if they want it for free. Actually, I dont think PayPal lets you enter $0, which brings up an interesting idea.

Try making them pay at least one cent for your music. If they have to get out their credit card or log into their PayPal account anyway, they will probably pay you more than that one cent. This sounds like a pretty good idea actually, I might try it.

In general, donation based music downloads do not make a lot of money, if any at all. So don’t rely on people to donate money for your music if you really need the money, because they wont. But if you find some variation of the idea behind donating for music or choosing the price, you may be able to get something to work.