Giving away a couple songs is great marketing and publicity. Recent research shows that giving away a song helps increase sales. Just ask hit band Coldplay.
"To drum up publicity for its new single, Violet Hill, which was released last week, the band decided to give it away for a week on its Web site as a free download. On the first day it was available, the song was downloaded more than 600,000 times, according to Billboard magazine. In 2005, Speed of Sound, the lead single from Coldplay's previous album, X&Y, sold [only] about 53,000 copies digitally in the United States and the United Kingdom" Houston Chronicle May 16, 2008
Billboard, Nielsen SoundScan, and major record labels not only tracks music sales, but online plays as well. The free download generated a lot of plays and web traffic to the Coldplay's website. Here are a few numbers below.
"According to the music social network last.fm, Violet Hill set a record among its 15 million members, who played the track about 33,000 times the first day, or once every two seconds." Houston Chronicle May 16, 2008
"the Coldplay Web site jumped 1,800 percent the day of the release over its traffic two days earlier. It moved from No. 305 to No. 1 on the company's chart of musician Web sites, with more than 2.5 percent of all the U.S. traffic to the sites they monitor." Houston Chronicle May 16, 2008
If anything, Coldplay may have set a new standard for online music marketing.
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