Nimbit | The Music Snob

Human Beings Detected!

I just got off the phone with Rick O’Neal, a friendly staffer from Nimbit. A few weeks ago I set up a free account with them so I could use their embeddable Online Merch Table (OMT), to sell my music directly to people from my various websites.

A Real Voice on the Phone

Though I usually just stare at unknown phone numbers with fear, for some reason I bothered to answer the call and was surprised to find that Nimbit was calling to find out how my sales were going. I know it was a sales call, as they want me to upgrade my account and give them some money, but it’s also in their best interests that I sell as much music as possible through my Nimbit OMT.

Given that this is web-based technology, the last thing I expect is to have a human actually call me to talk about my Nimbit account, and address additional ways I can try marketing and selling my music. Given that my music hasn’t “taken off” and I don’t have any gigs scheduled, I probably won’t upgrade my account anytime soon. But it sure raises their cache in my eyes that they actually call their users. I can’t think of any web-based service that’s ever called me to see what’s up…

Just Because You’re Paranoid, Don’t Mean They’re Not After You…

A paranoid person might say that Nimbit called me knowing I write this little blog on music marketing technology, but my rational side tells me that this is wishful thinking.

So, nice work Nimbit. Hopefully you guys will have a smaller module available soon for embedding in sidebars…

Anyone else have any good or bad experiences with these guys?

Use a Blog to Interact with Your Listeners

My new music has been out for under two weeks, and I’ve had great responses so far. The most rewarding part has been using social networking sites and my music blog to reach out to people I haven’t talked to in a while and let them know what I’ve been up to, and to create some dialogue about my music.

Don’t Assume Your Listeners Have Any Idea What You’ve Been Up To…

As a music creator absorbed with the minutia of my creations, I often make assumptions about what listeners will know or hear as they experience my music for the first time. As if the countless hours I put into the project, song lyrics, thought processes, etc. have somehow been broadcast to each and every person that may ever listen to the results.

So this time around, I’m trying to “lift the veil” so to speak and give people some insight into my creative process; by using a blog, I can write installments addressing different aspects of the music: lyrics, themes, art work, recording process, musicians, performance videos.

Don’t Waste Time and Money Building Your Own Site from Scratch

I’m finding that standard blog software is so well-developed that it has made it entirely unnecessary to put together my own website. Obviously some design customization is required, but wonderful programs like WordPress, which I use, have so much back-end functionality, which I could never program on my own. Online documentation and user communities are so extensive, that any answers to my development questions are found easily on Google or WordPress’ documentation site.

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Sell Music Directly from Your Website

Thanks to constant tech innovations, there are now a million ways for the independent artist to distribute music digitally. We’ve looked at services like Tunecore and CDBaby that will get your music to many of the major players in digital music sales. And now there are a bunch of ways for the artist to sell music directly from their websites, and enables fans to do the same, with little to no start-up costs. Awesome.

There’s a good introductory article on this topic by David Rose at Know The Music Biz’s Blog. He did a quick survey of his top 10 bands and found that many of them still don’t allow fans to buy mp3’s directly from their websites, myspace profiles, etc. His point being that this just makes it one step harder for people to become your fans. Sure they can go to iTunes, but you might lose some potential listeners that don’t want to bother loading iTunes, etc.

David points to a few services that will allow artists to set up their own webstores for mp3 downloads. These are: Musicane, Hooka, Easybe, and Nimbit.

I’ve checked these out and listed below are some initial thoughts on each one, based on my own requirements as a musician with very limited resources and not a huge fanbase. Most artists aren’t really going to sell that many downloads, no matter how good the music is. So getting free technology is key to making direct music sales worthwhile.

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