Are You Buying or Being Bought?

It’s Cyber Monday, which means that shoppers don’t have to put up tents and sleep outside to get into a store at a ridiculous hour of the morning to jockey for position on limited quantity deals.  Instead, the so-called bargains are all online.  You can make purchases dressed in a manner that you’d never go to the Black Friday sales in.

With all the ongoing talk of what state the music industry is in – or isn’t in – it raises the question of how much Cyber Monday shopping is being done on music.  After all, with the lion’s share of music sales being in digital format, what kind of gift giving is being done virtually?  Don’t holiday shoppers want to be able to hand (or ship) a loved one something they can see and touch?  With so many consumers going away from physical CDs it would seem that one of the last hopes is digital download cards.  But who among you have ever purchased even one of those?

That brings up the point of how hard today’s musician – who isn’t named, say, Katy Perry or Taylor Swift – needs to work to stay in the game.  Are you making sure that you do have physical CDs for sale so that such an option does exist for people to buy your music?  And what about download cards?  They’re not just for those big-named stars like Bruno Mars et al.  Can the shoppers who are hogging all the bandwidth today get one of those from your website?  And if not, why not?

If you’re reading this and saying, “Yeah, wow, I need to start looking into that,” then you’re too late.  Granted, there’s always time to try new things in marketing your music, but the point is that today is Cyber Monday, not every Monday.  And guess what?  The next one won’t come around for another year.

You need to make sure that instead of on the keyboard you are the one on the screen today, with people clicking to listen and buy your single or CD.

It goes without saying that all of this should be complementary to your live show merchandise efforts.

And what, by the way, will people be doing to gift music in, say, five years?  Well, that’s a blog for another time, but, for now, let’s hope the above was checks and balances for you.  Yes?  You’d already sent your e-newsletter out letting your fans know that there would be exclusive deals on your website on Cyber Monday, correct?  You already have content prepped to post on social media today about those one-day deals, right?  Good.  Last-minute shopping is something that lots of people endure, but last-minute scrambling to get a deal ready after the national retailers already did their email blast the night before or at 7am this morning is too late for you and your CD.

The hope is that instead of a blog, tomorrow morning you’ll be reading the sales report from your website and then spending the day fulfilling orders.