Free song of the day

Magnatune is now offering a "free song of the day." This is a no-cost single 128k mp3, without any talking on the end, that you can download for free. The idea is to promote a new song every day, and have people come regularly to the site to get the free song.

The new feature is promoted on the home page, and there's a dedicated "free song of the day" page at http://magnatune.com/today/ The picture on the right shows what this page looks like.

There's a form to fill out to get your download, to try to motivate people to subscribe to our once-a-month music news email, or the daily free-song-of-the-day email.

You don't have to provide your email address, you can simply click the "download free song" button and a zip file of the mp3 will be given to you, but the nudge is there to encourage people to sign up. The download is a zip file, so that the free song downloads well w/o having to hit "save as" in your web browser, which you usually need to do with mp3s.

The goals behind this new feature are to get more signups for our announcement list (since our announcement list size directly leads to sales), as well to get people to come to the magnatune web site more often.

One of the interesting things about our music news email is that we see a 3x spike in sales for several days after the email goes out.

This fact makes me believe that people are interested in buying from Magnatune, but they simply don't think about going to the site regularly.

Hence, the idea behind a song of the day announcement email, which is a daily email letting you listen to the song in your email client, and download it with a single click (no form to fill out) once you're on the daily announcement list.

The email announcement for the "song of the day" is formatted a bit differently (see picture at left). Among other changes, it includes an artist photograph. There's also a failsafe, super-easy unsubscribe email address at the bottom of every message.

If you read the email the day after the song-of-the-day was sent, you can still listen to the song in the email, but the "download free song" button will take you today's free song, not the previous one. That might be a bit confusing, which is why there's a "only available today, sunday" message below the download button.

Comments

[Nathan Jones]

A mailout is a good idea, but it's not for everybody. I can't find an RSS/Atom feed for new releases - is there one? I haven't bought anything from Magnatune for a while, largely because nothing has shown up in my feed reader to prompt me to visit.

[Ian]

Nice ... how about an RSS feed?

[John Buckman of Magnatune]

RSS?

Your wish is my command.

You'll now find an (RSS) link on the page at http://magnatune.com/today/ with a daily updated RSS feed.

[Nathan Jones]

Hi John,

Thanks for adding the song of the day RSS feed, although that's not quite what I was looking for (yes, I know I'm demanding...).

Is it possible to have one for the new music newsletter as well? With a link from http://magnatune.com/artists/new? Even better would be a [link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://..."] so that the browser knows there is an RSS version of the page and can display a feed icon. Another option would be to blog about new releases yourself or start a separate blog for your staff to post to.

I started out listening to CC:365, a blog with a daily CC-licenced song, but ended up not bothering. But I'd still love to find out when Magnatune releases a new album. No daily involvement, but an occasional message about a new album so that I can listen to several tracks of something that I know is new, with the option to buy the album if those tracks grab my attention.

Nathan

[Michael]

Hi, John--

I think the idea for a Song of the Day is great, but there's a problem. The /today/download/ link in my e-mail has sent me the same song every day since last Saturday. I now have six copies of Jeni Melia singing "Come away come sweet love" by John Dowland, and -- while she does have a lovely soprano -- it would have been nice to hear Spinecar, Craig and Westine, Zucker, Wray, Juergensen, and Paternoster too.

Am I doing something wrong or is there a glitch in the system?

Thanks,

Michael

[John Buckman of Magnatune]

"/today/download/ link in my e-mail has sent me the same song every day since last Saturday"

I can't recreate this problem. I just clicked on the download link today, and got the right mp3 from the download.

Can you try with a different web browser? I suspect the web browser is caching the download.

-john

[Michael]

Hi, John--

That did it. I normally use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer (because of the evil/not evil principle, which I'm sure you understand). (8^)

I visited the */today/download/ URL a minute ago with IE, and it downloaded the song "Hands of God" by Pain Factor. I flushed the cache on Firefox and tried it with Firefox -- voila, "Hands of God". Smart thinking, John.

Thanks,

Michael