10 Million Songs That No One Bought

In a recent Seth Godin post, he quotes a statistic that says “of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.” From this Seth concludes that the likelihood of you selling 0% of your products is quite high. It’s easy to put stuff out there and so the long tail is pretty crowded these days.

In a related post, Derek Sivers talks about a guy who just wanted 1% of the viewers of his advertisement to buy his cd. He pressed 10,000 copies ahead of time but only got 4 sales after a few weeks. Another depressing statistic outlining the fact that it is possible you won’t sell any (or much less than 1%). His point is that the math can be deceiving and difficult to achieve in reality.

If you’re trying to sell music or any other product or service, these statistics can be extremely discouraging. So what can we learn from this?

Sell what people are buying. Millions of people are buying things online every day. Find out what those things are and sell those products. Check the Amazon best sellers list for your category, check the better selling products for your favorite affiliate network of choice. Use your content (music, blog posts, tutorials, etc) to sell these popular products rather than try to sell your own products at first. Use ‘free’ to gain attention and draw traffic to your site.

Focus on a small niche. The long tail is crowded. Part of the battle will be just getting enough traffic to your site. Pick a really specific niche, find keywords that you can reasonably compete with and target those lesser competitive keywords. By lesser competitive I mean keywords that have around 10,000 pages in the search results, but still get enough daily searches. Find the cost per click for your keyword and multiply it by the number of daily searches to get a relative sense of the value of the keyword. If people are spending money on ads then it is a good indication that there is a market there. Market Samurai is a great tool for this type of research.