Corey is a great example of how you can make money from letting people freely share your music.
Corey has a lot of things he shares with many other musicians. He is letting the fans download his songs for free from his website. Actually Corey likes to call them patrons because he wants to develop a relationship with them, and feels that ‘fan’ sounds too temporary.
This desire to connect with the audience is also the motivation behind the free albums. According to Marty, his manager, ideas are the basis of all art in creating an emotional connection with the audience. Once that is in place, getting paid for what you do is not a problem.
Like many of the musicians using a freemium like model, the approach was very intuitive. There were no elaborate business plans or conversion rate calculations. Based on watching the music industry, they had a feeling that if people could listen to the album, they would buy albums and concert tickets.
Following this thought, the manager sees it as his main assignment to remove any barriers there might be to accessing the music. And it seems like they are on to something:
With little traditional marketing the music has spread and last year created revenue of 4 million dollars. Corey and his manager are sure that the free downloads has helped spread as well as sell the songs.
To examine this assumption they removed the free downloads from the webpage for a period of 2 weeks, and the sales on ITunes dropped. Once the free downloads were put back up, the sale started rising again.
In this video he talk about the motivation for releasing free downloads:
Photo: Mike Burton
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