What Color Is Your CD?
I am extremely productive tonight. Right now, I'm editing my second What Color Is Your CD order for my hobbit CD sponsors. I have two done and two more to complete. I think that is the last stuff I need to do to complete those sponsorship packages.
I'm debating whether I'll do any more of these. They're actually fairly easy to record and edit… when I can get off my arse to do it. I can't even use my daughter as an excuse. This is just one of those projects that takes a little bit more effort on my part.
Now I say I might stop it, but… It's not like a get a ton of orders for it. Sometimes in the music business as in life you have to do what you're not in the mood to do.
New Celtic Christmas Single
Last year, I wrote a love song for my wife for Christmas. It's called “Christmas in Scotland”. I quietly released the song as a single back in September. Last week, I listened to the version I uploaded it. It had an error in it. Must've happened in the upload.
Nevertheless, I uploaded a new version tonight. With any luck, it will be online by the weekend… without any errors.
Do NOT download the September 15, 2011 released album. You will be disappointed.
Oh! Any chance I can talk you into buying the single on a specified date so I can push it up the charts? Pretty please!?!?!?
I'll have details about it once the Celtic Christmas single goes online.
Back to Louisiana Renaissance Festival This Weekend
Week #2 of faire kicks off in just two days. No word from the E.D. about show changes. So look for me at the Painted Badger at 11:00am and 4:15pm.
Hobbit CD Holding Steady
Sales for Don't Go Drinking With Hobbits are holding steady. The physical album still hasn't shown up at CD Baby. I guess I forgot to send copies. So I put some in the mail today. The digital album is still not on Amazon or iTunes. I'm not sure what the delay is.
Meantime, it has slipped out of the Top 5 for British Folk and for Drinking Songs. So I guess it's time to up the promotion.
Victims of Irish Music Continues to Slip from iTunes
Victims of Irish Music is a compilation I released in 2007 of indie Celtic music groups. It is by far my most-popular album I've released on Mage Records. It's followed closely by only one other, Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers. For the past year, Victims was one of the Top 4 albums on iTunes when you search for Irish music. It is now #8.
That may not seem too important, but it is.
Zipf's law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.
What this means for me is that items at the top of the search results get exponentially more hits than those further down the list. That is the reason I spend so much time promoting my Celtic Playlists, search engine optimization (SEO), and creating websites designed to promote Celtic music. I know that the more music I do that, the more fans I make.
I started promoting the Celtic Playlists when I learned that songs on popular playlists on iTunes helped the albums climb up the charts. One playlist I published had 50 top ratings for it. That sent Victims to #1 on iTunes.
Victims of Irish Music and The Secret World of Celtic Rock are so successful on the search engines that I've been able to donate a couple thousand dollars this year alone to various Celtic non-profits, including the Texas Scottish Festival and Stone Mountain Highland Games, among others.
Unfortunately, no SEO is perfect. Eventually, you lose your spots. Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers is no longer one of the top albums for “Irish drinking songs” searches. The Brobdingnagian Bards are no longer the #1 download Celtic band of all time. Things change.
In fact, since iTunes switched to Ping, my Celtic playlists have steadily lost popularity. I've had several fans want to help out, but they don't have iTunes or iTunes wasn't working properly at the time. Whatever the case, unless I can find a new way to generate enthusiasm for the Celtic Playlists, I guess I might need to abandon them.
Okay. That's enough rambling for this evening.
Slainte!
