Categories
Music

Analytics

For a musician with such a small audience, this is pretty meaningless, but as a stats nerd it’s kind of interesting to track the popularity of my recordings. Here are the current on line results:

What I can observe is that the “niche” songs that can be marketed to a specific audience (Yukoners, surf music lovers, power pop fans, 60s retro, etc.) can generate views more easily than a general rock song. Videos that pop up in “suggested” algorithms, or in response to associated searches (e.g. “Yukon Rafting”) do well.

 “What? Why?” leads in Bandcamp simply because it’s the first track on the album, and “MAP” is correspondingly in second place as the second track; listeners are giving the album a try, then fading out after a few songs.

Prior to releasing the album in late 2022 I focused on promoting songs via their videos; they are also the easiest way to share new songs with friends and family, since everybody is familiar with Youtube and it’s a standard app on most computers. With the album out, my focus is now shifting to Bandcamp (sales) and Spotify (streaming) so I would look to see those numbers grow. Soundcloud doesn’t get much usage, even though it is free. I’ll add data from other sites such as Apple Music in the future.

I’d note that “I’m Coming Over Tonight” had the benefit of being the first release (six years ago) and had a lot of friends and co-workers tuning in simply because of the novelty of me actually making a record, but the 2018 video continues to get views because it is professionally made and the only one showing a full live band performance.

By the way, there’s no money to be made from Youtube at my level; the threshold for payment is 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. With my current 60 subscribers and 255 watch hours, it will be a long time before that happens!