15 MONTHS INTO THE WORKBENCH EXPERIMENT
"Experiment" truly is the right word: not as in a scientific experiment, but more the "I don't know what's going to happen next" sense of the word. Since the site launched in September 2009, the general premise of Workbench Recordings has stayed the same: a place where I presented my music, and others', for free, with the hope of the benefit of mutual promotion for all concerned -- and to create a unique spot on the internet for interesting, otherwise unavailable music. Within that scheme, the music was posted with the all of the trappings of a physical release, minus the mass: unique cover art, credits, and liner notes. And the release schedule was ambitious: new music every Tuesday.
That was the initial plan, anyway. It was executed faithfully for roughly eight months, but then dissolved into something different; something that involved a number of false starts and changes of direction, which hasn't yet re-materialized into something else.
The original plan for the frequency of posts was good; consistency is necessary if you want to build an online audience. Only thing was, I couldn't keep up with the schedule. When I launched the site, I had been at the same company for nine years, and in roughly the same position there for five. The job had become almost second nature, and I could do what I had to do and still have enough space in my head left over to concoct an ambitious moonlighting project like this one. But that began to change in December 2010, when I started doing some freelance work for Masterdisk. By May, when I was hired as the studio's marketing director, much of that open mental space had disappeared, and the new gig, which was both enjoyable and challenging, took over much of my remaining resources.
So in May I decided that Workbench would go to a once-monthly schedule. I knew what it meant: that the regular audience that the site had gained would dissipate; but it couldn't be helped.
Workbench wasn't a runaway success by May 2010 as it was. Interestingly, or at least it was to me, and not a little baffling at the time, was that the site's stats were pretty flat in its first eight months. (Today it's not so surprising to me; I really would have had to have given it a year or two of steady updating to see the gains in audience I was expecting after half a year.)
I measured traffic to the site for seven months, between October 2009 and April 2010, by how many times a track was played in full. The best month was January 2010, with 288 plays. The quietest month was April, with 135. I stopped paying attention to the stats after that, though as you would expect from the major slowdown in the schedule, traffic is at a trickle today. Overall, I counted 1,620 listens in seven months.
As long as I'm showing you around the back room, let's stop over at operations. Hosting the site has cost me around $200 since it started -- pretty cheap by my reckoning. Unfortunately, the "in" column has many less marks in it, though.
When I launched Workbench I thought it would stimulate CD sales, but that's not what happened. I wasn't expecting high numbers (it's funny to even say that), but I was figuring that there would be some ratio of free listens to sales; maybe something like 200 listens to 1 CD sold. In actuality, since the launch in September 2009 I have sold, I think, 2 CDs.
Actually, to get a more complete picture of what the free-to-sales ratio might look like, lets go back to 2006. Since May of that year, when I released my first CD, Java St. Bagatelles, I estimate that I have sold 65 CDs in total (including my second album Fresh Twigs). But the free downloads have been a lot more active.
Java St. Bagatelles was posted for free download (with my consent) on the blog Grown So Ugly (now defunct, unfortunately) sometime in late 2006 (and on another blog as well, called Closet of Curiosities). The last time I checked, in January 2010, between the two blogs the album had been downloaded over 1,500 times. If Grown So Ugly remained active beyond then, and I imagine it did, the number would probably have been greater.
In May I posted my third album, Astral Law, for free download at the Free Music Archive. Since then tracks from it have been listened to nearly 3,000 times, and the album has been downloaded over 560 times.
Later, in September 2010, I posted a handful of tracks from Fresh Twigs at FMA. Those have been listened to nearly 2,500 times times, and downloaded over 325 times.
My tracks have been played over 1,800 times at LastFM.
So, since 2006, I have sold 65 CDs, but my albums and tracks have been listened to and/or downloaded over 10,000 times.
Unfortunately, I can't draw much useful information from what is really at best a shoddy display of record keeping. I would be tempted to simply say that for every 173 free downloads I could expect to sell 1 album, but the fact is that most of the CD sales came before 2009, and most of the downloads after.
My music's dispersion and reception over the internet remains a mystery to me; a mystery in which I'm content to wait for clues. Like the guitarist Matt Stevens has said, "obscurity is the enemy, not piracy." I'll continue to make my recordings as accessible as possible, while hoping to gain listeners. And eventually perhaps more listeners will come who want to support my work by buying my releases.
Speaking of releases, I hope to offer a few more options for those future purchasers in 2011. For starters, there will be a physical release of my album Astral Law in a small run CDR edition of 50, mastered by Scott Hull. Eventually, provided there's enough funds, there will be a vinyl version.
