Sales and licensing way up, why?

For the past 6 weeks, things have been great for Magnatune. We did 36 music licenses in September, an all time high, with almost all of them going to films or video production houses, which is wonderful as this is likely repeat business. Also, weekly sales are up 40% over the flat-no-growth that we've experience the past 12 months before that.

Why? Impossible to be sure, but some ideas...

One thing that changed is that I fired both my PR agencies (UK and San Francisco). The SF PR folks wanted a less-negative sounding Magnatune, replacing the slogan "we are not evil" with "everybody wins" and not bashing the evil music business any longer, emphasizing the positive. Also, a great deal of effort was made manufacturing "nice news" such as charities.

Since saying goodbye to them, I've launched
a) copy your purchased music for your friends
b) the "we are not evil" recruiting cards (10,000 given out already, in just 3 weeks)
c) the podcast-us-for-free license
d) as well as some significant improvements to the web site thanks to some free time I now have.

We've also gotten a full page article in The Economist which is great for our reputation (thanks go to the UK PR agency for getting that) though few web hits came from that, since The Economist web site content is subscriber only.

It could be the "back to school" crowd, but I don't think so, as sales have been flat for well over a year.

Web site hits are up about the same about, about 40%, which probably accounts for a large amount of the new increased daily purchase rate, but my web logs don't show those hits are coming from any particular site: it's mostly people typing in the http://magnatune.com url directly into their browsers.

All good news so far, we'll have to see if this positive trend increases, stabilizes, or passes. So far, we're on 6 weeks of this.

Comments

[Joel Benjamine]

Hey John, just reading your latest magnatune discuss post on the sales spike. For what its worth, more folks have written into us and cited the Economist article than any other piece of press we have received since I've been answering the mail.. Many said they had found us in the magazine and were making their first purchases with us because of it. Same with the recruiting cards- more than a few have stated that they found us that way.

- joel, who answers the email for magnatune

[Sophie]

Good news !
Among improvements to the site, do you think adding a search box for artist/album/genre search would be easy ? The list of magnatune artists is growing, finding someone in the list is not that quick...

[John Buckman]

do you think adding a search box for artist/album/genre search would be easy

It won't be easy, but it's high on my todo list, hence my recent visit to last.fm to work with them to get "sounds like" data from them.

-john

[Greg Meyer]

How about all of those people booting into the amaroK LiveCD which loads the Magnatune.com site by default ;)

[rams]

In Finland and France, some of the credit for renewed exposure could be given to the current debate over Copyright law, which makes it very close to US DMCA.

In Finland, the new law passed on 6th of October, but given the public reaction, it will have a trial period of one year, after which there will be a new vote to confirm or infirm the law.

In France, it is du next month, through an "emergency procedure", which leaves much less time for parliamentary debate.

[Jeff Rush]

Please don't drop the 'we are not evil' logo for that soft sounding 'everybody wins'. Your current logo is not perceived as negative here. And your bashing of the music industry is soft, not grating, so don't stop that either. I'm a magnatune customer as a form of protest of the existing state of the music industry. It's the only place I get music anymore.

BTW, I've not received the sample set of recommendation cards, although I requested them weeks ago. If you just haven't gotten to it yet, that's fine but if you're current, then I need to re-request. I think they're a great idea and have an opportunity to hand out lots.