No names, no faces. Wait, how am I supposed to write about these guys? Here’s what I do know and can share: the production duo AZEDIA met at school in Southeast England and started doing bootleg remixes in 2010. One currently lives in Brighton, while the other lives in Berlin. They try to keep themselves anonymous so the focus stays on the music. That’s fair.
AZEDIA tried something new for their recent album,Form. They launched it exclusively through Gumroad. Why? For the data, for the audience connections, and for the convenience of having a launch date without the mastered files. So how did the launch go? I talked to half of the duo all about it.
Why did you decide to exclusively launch your latest album, Form, through Gumroad? Did you keep it exclusive, or was that just for the initial launch?
We wanted to know which fans financially support the music, not just ‘like’ our Facebook page. Both are great, but there’s a difference. When selling through iTunes etc., it’s the store that gets the customer info, which is useless to us if we want to contact those fans directly—which we do. The album will be available shortly on those stores/streaming services for the fans who still feel more comfortable buying music the way they are used to.
Can you give me a quick rundown of your launch strategy?
For Form, we set up the pre-order early on, partly to motivate us to get it finished. This was important because pre-orders on iTunes usually require the audio files too, which we didn’t have. So this actually enabled us to get the music out to the world as soon as it was ready. We gradually started uploading the tracks to Soundcloud/YouTube and got some blog attention for Kin which made it to the top 5 on Hype Machine. Once the album dropped, we continued uploading the remaining tracks and allowing YouTube promotion channels to do the same.
You guys made really good use of Overlay on your site. Very sleek. There is no question here. Just props.
Cheers for making it so easy.
Two-part question: what would you say you’ve gained doing it this way, and what would you say you lost, if anything?
We now know exactly which fans got the album, and can easily reach out to them. Perhaps we lost some sales to people who prefer buying through their iTunes account, but as we said, we’re making it available there too.
Care to share any analytics? For example, highest referrers for sales (email, Facebook, SoundCloud, YouTube)?
Sure—for us, direct email resulted in 3x more sales than the next-best referrers (which were Facebook and SoundCloud tied). This further proved to us the importance of knowing who your paying fans are and being able to contact them direct via email.
At the same time as launch, we also put up our 2012 release Isolation EP on Gumroad as a free download. We started sending out the link to any new followers on Twitter. Then using Gumroad’s Workflows, we set up an auto-email to anyone who got the free download, telling them about Form and providing a link. This system has been working very well and has given new life to the old music.
So you likely had a peak launch day and then the ol’ Dropoff of Doom. Did you do anything to try to keep the momentum going?
When it launched, only a couple of the tracks had been streamed (on YouTube and SoundCloud), so we’ve been uploading different tracks every couple of weeks since. Sometimes people hear one song they love and want to get the rest of the album. There might be some videos on the way, too.
After having access to all of this data, is there anything you plan on doing differently for the next album?
We’ll definitely do it this way again, and next time we’ll be able to email all the fans who bought Form, maybe with an early download or something to show our thanks.
Nice. So what’s being going on with AZEDIA recently?
Working on new material, and finishing some older stuff. Doing our best to make music that is true for us now, and not getting stuck in old patterns of creativity. There will be more music out this year.
There’s bound to be some gear heads out there who’d love to get a peek of your setup.
Oooooh. Buttons. Thanks for sharing your launch experience.
Thanks. Hopefully other artists will be inspired to get access to their data.
Well, you’ve got your launch, and you’ve got your data. What are you going to do with it? Check out our Resource Center for tips and case studies.