Typhoonicano
Newbie
- Jun 6, 2014
- 2
- 7
So I've been toying around with this idea for a while, and have hit kind of a road block. While I am always reading around on BHW, I've yet to actually make an account until now. It seems like the sort of community where you can post methods and everyone gives some genuine feedback and helps create a solid method.
So last year I had released a music album through an online distributor for $30 to send to all stores. Along with sending the music to Amazon, iTunes, etc it also sent the music to Rdio, Spotify, etc.
Having absolutely no fan base whatsoever that I was able to get one or two album sales a month for the music, just from having a decent looking cover that seemed to draw people to listen in. I wasn't really doing the music to make money, more just because I had the songs and figured it was worth $30 to make it feel more legitimate.
What I did discover, though, is the music streaming services actually ended up paying a lot more than the purchases. Most of the plays, initially, were from my own friends/family/self... But once those plays came and went, it had boosted my album up high enough to be "charting" on the new releases, which apparently a vast majority of the users look through to check out all of the music. On Rdio, specifically, you can see those who are listening and to how many tracks. It wasn't much.
Once the royalties came in after the two month delay, I recognized the potential. It didn't matter what the length of the song was (for Rdio, specifically) or how many songs were on the track... essentially... a play equals a penny. (It's a little less than that on average, maybe like $.0086/play)
I noticed the entire song did not need to be played through in order to register a "play" on Rdio's play count. I created a macro clicker to listen to 5 seconds of the track, and then would select next. I got the plays up to about 200,000 which was a majority of me, but also a few hundred users at least who saw the quickly rising album on the top charts, and I waited the two months. Unfortunately in that test I did not get paid for the skip plays, only those legitimately generated by the users.
Back to the drawing board
I went ahead and did a test where me and my friends recorded an album of 60 5-10 second tracks of spoken words, and released it for the $30. I then took two paid accounts ($10 a month) and put the album on repeat for about 48 hours. After the 48 hour period, I checked in on it to see that the plays drove up to almost 59,000 plays but the album was pulled off of the website and listed as unavailable. Two months later though, I had the royalties for 58,798 plays, which came to $502.87. This was at the cost of $50 (two paid accounts streaming, 1 album release).
I was very encouraged, but disappointed that I would have to create original content each time I did this... I also can imagine that doing that even more than once would create a lot of suspicion with the distributor, as well as Rdio, and could lock out potential funds through future releases.
I then created two albums with this same concept, except this time it was essentially a sound effects album. 60+ tracks on each album. Rdio had just released free ad-supported accounts which pay out exactly as paid account plays do, so I created a few more Rdio accounts with random email accounts, and limited the accounts to listening once per day.
At that rate, it was roughly 125 plays per day/per account... if that process is repeated each day to alleviate suspicion, you're looking at 3750 plays per month, or a little over $30 per account. I did this for a month with a couple of accounts and ended up over the course of two months registering another 46,754 and 22,794 plays, or another $681.38 from the $60 album releases. This time, though, because of the account swapping and safe play -- those albums remained active.
I went ahead and created two more albums to be released, which would take my total available plays between albums to 250... The distributor did issue a warning about what seemed to potentially be happening, but allowed the album to go through anyway:
?Store end streaming abuse? is when a store's fraud review team, in their sole judgment, determine that a particular song or album has been played an abnormally high number of times within a small number of store accounts, oftentimes thousands of streams per account. They further state that these streams can inflate an album's position within store charts and lower the overall per-stream-value of all albums within the store. As a result, streaming stores such as Spotify, Xbox music, Rdio and Rhapsody consider this a violation of their terms and conditions. Such streaming abuse also leads to significant financial losses for stores. At this point we can still give you the opportunity to release your album if you would like, however, please note that if stores contact us about streaming abuse on this release in the future, we will need to take further action. This may include but is not limited to taking down the release from all stores, and/or the withholding of any funds that are deemed fraudulently obtained. If you do not want to continue with distribution we can also fully refund your purchase for you. Please reply to acknowledge that you have read and understood the above and let me know how you would like to proceed with your release. Thank you."
This has potential. I don't have the patience or time available to create 200 accounts and to switch through them every day to listen to the ~20 minutes of tracks each day. If this could be automated, that would be amazing. Ultimately you'd want to continue to increase your catalog and rotate albums out of play, because the more plays they amass, the higher in the ranks they are and the questions start getting raised with an album that is just rambling has 1,000,000 plays.
That being said, a month of single play through pays for another album the next month, so a little bit of start up capital goes a long way as long as we can perfect the method without getting it shut down before it ever has a chance to breathe.
A million plays is worth around $8600-9000. On a single album, that's definitely a tell that something is up.. but even just spreading that out over 20 albums you're only putting 50,000 plays per album, at a startup cost of $600 to distribute the 20 albums.
I feel like I've been rambling, but as I said I've been doing this for a while, and haven't quite gotten it right yet, and am interested in getting some feedback. The way I see it, I'm sitting on over $1,000 in play money after my initial investment has been paid off... So if I can get a good idea together, I'll run at it.
Thanks!!
So last year I had released a music album through an online distributor for $30 to send to all stores. Along with sending the music to Amazon, iTunes, etc it also sent the music to Rdio, Spotify, etc.
Having absolutely no fan base whatsoever that I was able to get one or two album sales a month for the music, just from having a decent looking cover that seemed to draw people to listen in. I wasn't really doing the music to make money, more just because I had the songs and figured it was worth $30 to make it feel more legitimate.
What I did discover, though, is the music streaming services actually ended up paying a lot more than the purchases. Most of the plays, initially, were from my own friends/family/self... But once those plays came and went, it had boosted my album up high enough to be "charting" on the new releases, which apparently a vast majority of the users look through to check out all of the music. On Rdio, specifically, you can see those who are listening and to how many tracks. It wasn't much.
Once the royalties came in after the two month delay, I recognized the potential. It didn't matter what the length of the song was (for Rdio, specifically) or how many songs were on the track... essentially... a play equals a penny. (It's a little less than that on average, maybe like $.0086/play)
I noticed the entire song did not need to be played through in order to register a "play" on Rdio's play count. I created a macro clicker to listen to 5 seconds of the track, and then would select next. I got the plays up to about 200,000 which was a majority of me, but also a few hundred users at least who saw the quickly rising album on the top charts, and I waited the two months. Unfortunately in that test I did not get paid for the skip plays, only those legitimately generated by the users.
Back to the drawing board
I went ahead and did a test where me and my friends recorded an album of 60 5-10 second tracks of spoken words, and released it for the $30. I then took two paid accounts ($10 a month) and put the album on repeat for about 48 hours. After the 48 hour period, I checked in on it to see that the plays drove up to almost 59,000 plays but the album was pulled off of the website and listed as unavailable. Two months later though, I had the royalties for 58,798 plays, which came to $502.87. This was at the cost of $50 (two paid accounts streaming, 1 album release).
I was very encouraged, but disappointed that I would have to create original content each time I did this... I also can imagine that doing that even more than once would create a lot of suspicion with the distributor, as well as Rdio, and could lock out potential funds through future releases.
I then created two albums with this same concept, except this time it was essentially a sound effects album. 60+ tracks on each album. Rdio had just released free ad-supported accounts which pay out exactly as paid account plays do, so I created a few more Rdio accounts with random email accounts, and limited the accounts to listening once per day.
At that rate, it was roughly 125 plays per day/per account... if that process is repeated each day to alleviate suspicion, you're looking at 3750 plays per month, or a little over $30 per account. I did this for a month with a couple of accounts and ended up over the course of two months registering another 46,754 and 22,794 plays, or another $681.38 from the $60 album releases. This time, though, because of the account swapping and safe play -- those albums remained active.
I went ahead and created two more albums to be released, which would take my total available plays between albums to 250... The distributor did issue a warning about what seemed to potentially be happening, but allowed the album to go through anyway:
?Store end streaming abuse? is when a store's fraud review team, in their sole judgment, determine that a particular song or album has been played an abnormally high number of times within a small number of store accounts, oftentimes thousands of streams per account. They further state that these streams can inflate an album's position within store charts and lower the overall per-stream-value of all albums within the store. As a result, streaming stores such as Spotify, Xbox music, Rdio and Rhapsody consider this a violation of their terms and conditions. Such streaming abuse also leads to significant financial losses for stores. At this point we can still give you the opportunity to release your album if you would like, however, please note that if stores contact us about streaming abuse on this release in the future, we will need to take further action. This may include but is not limited to taking down the release from all stores, and/or the withholding of any funds that are deemed fraudulently obtained. If you do not want to continue with distribution we can also fully refund your purchase for you. Please reply to acknowledge that you have read and understood the above and let me know how you would like to proceed with your release. Thank you."
This has potential. I don't have the patience or time available to create 200 accounts and to switch through them every day to listen to the ~20 minutes of tracks each day. If this could be automated, that would be amazing. Ultimately you'd want to continue to increase your catalog and rotate albums out of play, because the more plays they amass, the higher in the ranks they are and the questions start getting raised with an album that is just rambling has 1,000,000 plays.
That being said, a month of single play through pays for another album the next month, so a little bit of start up capital goes a long way as long as we can perfect the method without getting it shut down before it ever has a chance to breathe.
A million plays is worth around $8600-9000. On a single album, that's definitely a tell that something is up.. but even just spreading that out over 20 albums you're only putting 50,000 plays per album, at a startup cost of $600 to distribute the 20 albums.
I feel like I've been rambling, but as I said I've been doing this for a while, and haven't quite gotten it right yet, and am interested in getting some feedback. The way I see it, I'm sitting on over $1,000 in play money after my initial investment has been paid off... So if I can get a good idea together, I'll run at it.
Thanks!!
