JustDave

Since the release of my CD Well I Never… at the end of September, I have been working quite hard to get it some exposure. So far it is available here , CDBaby and most recently iTunes,. I have had online reviews and interviews with various sites, I am advertising it on all of the other 14 sites I am involved with and it will shortly be on every other significant online download retailer you can think of.

I offer free high quality MP3 downloads of five songs on this website and lower quality downloads of the same songs on a further three other sites.

For the most part the reviews have been great, the critical feedback on GarageBand.com has been very positive and the people who have listened to the songs are generally impressed. I am getting a reasonable amount of traffic through each of the sites and am high on the charts in a couple of them (in fact I have been Number One for two weeks on the UnsignedBandWeb.com Pop/Rock chart with up to four songs in the top ten at the same time.)

The problem though, is with MySpace. As of yesterday (1st November) I hit 1000 song plays from over 2700 visits. On the surface that looks quite OK, but considering I have six songs on there (and have always had no less than four) it had the potential for between 10,000 and 15,000 song plays relative to the number of visitors. The fact that it is only around one listen per 2.7 visits suggests that a lot of visitors look at the number of song plays and think ‘That’s Not Very Popular So It Can’t Be Any Good’.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a moan it is just a statement of the Bleedin’ Obvious about something which will be affecting all new MySpace members. Most of the MySpace sites I have looked at have been there for at least a couple of years where mine has only been there since the start of August this year (as in a couple of months). I am very, very grateful to all the people who have taken the time to have look and even more so to those who had a listen but isn’t it obvious to most people that when you see a band from Outer Mongolia that has 10,000 visits but 1.2 million song plays and only two songs on the track list that they may have bought a bit of dodgy software to create an illusion?

The easy answer to that question is obviously NO, a large number of people are obviously influenced only by the song play counter completely in spite of all the other available facts and I don’t doubt as a result of the deception these bands are now getting significantly more genuine plays. I'm not actually sure which is the most sad, the fact that bands resort to this or the fact that people are so hyped up over a (fictional) expectation of Instant Celebrity that they force bands to resort to this to be noticed in the first place.

At this point you may be thinking that ‘people aren’t listening to your songs because they are rubbish, but as yet there hasn’t been sufficient people listening to my songs on MySpace to pass that sort of judgement and the other sites are suggesting a different story.

Either way I am glad to have got that of my chest and I can safely say that I am in this for the long game and won’t be resorting to underhand tactics to attract attention. Let’s see what has happened in another few months.

Thanks for reading.
-JD-