Does it justify the time? If you make $200 more / month, but it took you 20 hours of playlist making-logging-and voting….maybe that time could be better spent just making music…and money damn it all?

What do you think?

After Ariel’s feature article she posted 4/16/09 about “Promoting Your Music on Itunes” I told Ariel that I would try it out. Since I started putting imixes on Itunes and voting for them, I have sold some digital albums of my CD called “Out of the Blue” and I have sold 8 of my tracks as singles. This is exciting because I have had all of the mixes in the top rated category at least for a while. The best place was #15 on the top 100 chart.

I have given the links to friends, family, myspace friends, links on Twitter and asked everyone to vote on my imixes, I know that other people have been voting for them too a lot, which is very helpful. The imix must be good or it doesn’t work. Another thing is that I have seen a lot more traffic to my personal website, so I think people are listening to longer excerpts there and the whole songs can be heard on my myspace page which has also seen more traffic lately. People don’t buy something unless they listen to it first. I look at all of this as just getting people to hear it, whether they choose to buy it is 100% up to them.

In the old days I understand the major record labels paid interns to sit and call all the radio stations all day to request the songs of their labels artists, so this type of thing exists and has existed in the music world for decades.

Since it takes a while for revenues to flow from Itunes, thru CD Baby, I won’t know how much
was sold in terms of dollars for some weeks. I have vowed to continue it until I see those first numbers. It is very time consuming, but I am pleased it actually works! I am just like the next musician, I would rather spend my time writing the songs then marketing my album. However if I don’t do it, no one will. That’s the reality of an indie artist.

Some more exciting news is that a few days ago I was contacted by the creative coordinator for Itunes for the Houston market. They have asked me to do a showcase in a “Itunes Live – Houston” event. It will take place July 18th. They will be putting me on the Apple website in the
next few weeks to start advertising it worldwide.

So a very big THANK YOU to Ariel and to her friend in Brooklyn she interviewed. I sure wish I could ask that person some more detailed questions, there are some subtle nuances in the way this marketing is done, but YES IT DEFINITELY WORKS!

Alicia Selby

gorglav from ggaarecords