Nik Furious is leaving iTunes and Amazon...
...and posting all of his music HERE. And it's all going to be free.
Why? Lemme break it down for you with some statistics. Here are my total sales on iTunes, Amazon, and other mass-market MP3 channels from December 2009 thru August 2011:
Wow. I don't know what to say. I mean, I didn't do any online advertising and my self-promotion was mostly social media. I guess I didn't do enough!
On the flip, here are my listening stats from the podPress plugin on this blog. Note that these stats are only from the past 13 months because I lost all my previous podPress stats when I switched webhosts at the end of 2010 (that explains why Windrider and Superior Tech only have 8 plays a piece):
Now that's more like it! What a difference free makes, right? Those numbers are much closer to what I expected from online sales.
Not long before I started selling my music through TuneCore, I was ranking on the first page of Google for "instrumental songs." Why? Because I had an old link on the Nik Furious MySpace account that linked directly (i.e. NOT a nofollow link) to my nikfurious.htm webpage. Like a fool, I didn't realize the potency of that link and I took it down when I transitioned NickMarino.net into a blog. Whooops!
Anyway, to sum it up, it's not worth $50 a year to sell $2.50 worth of music. I'd rather give it away for free and know that at least a couple hundred people are enjoying my music rather than making 3 people pay for it.
My Nik Furious music posts will return in 2012, starting with my album Brilliant Shower. I'll post all of the songs individually first, and then post the entire album as a .ZIP file, just like my mixtapes I've been sharing for the past couple of years. And later in 2012, I'll release my next 100% original album, 7 Star Sky Flash Kick.
[...] I've decided to leave iTunes and Amazon and release all of my music for free from my website. Click here for more about my decision (and find out what you can expect from Nik Furious [...]
[...] buddy (& sometimes comic collaborator) Nick Marino just posted in his blog about pulling all his music off of iTunes & Amazon because of crappy sales numbers the past [...]