Free Noise
Every now and again, I get bitten by a "project" bug and nothing can get distract me from coding my current interest. Well this weekend has had me bitten twice, one surprisingly for a and the second is a small development project for my good friends in the Manchester Death Metal outfit, Foetal Juice.
Having a massive interest in digital and music, I often have ideas or read things online about different methods of reaching audiences online. Being a failed musician myself, I can only experiment with these opportunities with my friends bands or observe other people's experiments. Having read a lot about the importance of building a database of fans and the most effective ways of giving music away for free, particularly from Mr Trent Reznor who seems to have a decent grasp of the benefits of digital distribution to the music industry (see ) - I decided that I'd try and help Foetal Juice reach the online death metal community and see if we can get a grasp of who is interested in the band.
They simply asked me for a way of storing their latest demo online for people to download for free, but I seized the opportunity to build the aforementioned fan database. The system I built takes minimal details from the user along with a compulsory newsletter subscription (which the user can later opt out of). Had we been spending any money on this, I'd have used a postcode lookup script for the location management, but for now I decided just to ask the user which city they're from. This then gives us the power to tell each user when there is a Foetal Juice gig in their area, a very powerful tool if the database fills up. It may even enable the band to finally book a show in London.
Each user is emailed the link to the EP, which is unique for every person. Once they have clicked the link, it expires. They may re-activate their link if they fill the form out again, but this stops people from just sharing the direct link to the files (the location of which is hidden to the public by a PHP download script) - so that we know who everyone is that is interested in the EP. One drawback I've experienced so far is that my host (GoDaddy) obviously has a large outgoing mail queue, so sometimes the email is instant and sometimes it takes a few minutes to come through.
You can find the system I built for Foetal Juice at www.willbeardmore.com/foetal/demo (we'll be moving it to their domain when I get access to it). The awesome artwork on there is done by Chris Henry. If you like what you hear, the best place to find out more is or . They are on , but it's not managed very well at the moment.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has done any experiments like this in the past and how successful they were? If you're looking to get some free music, is it a deterrent when the website requests your email? Have you used the system I built for Foetal Juice, what did you think?