Weird about my Bandcamp stats
Thu, 05/19/2011 - 2:53pm
Quite odd,
checking the Bandcamp statistics for my Bandcamp page shows that when I added the Schwervon/Jeff Lewis EP and the Diane Cluck/Jeff Lewis collaborations material, the action at the page dropped massively. Right now it has been seven days since anything was bought from my Bandcamp page, but before this week there had never been more than three days in a row without a single sale of something, ever since the first day the Bandcamp page existed (about two months ago). Usually there's maybe one or two things that get sold every day, and then one day or two days where nothing sells, then another sale or two. On a big day there might be five sales. There was only one time where three days went by with no sales, tho two days in a row with no sales was not uncommon.
I really thought that adding more albums to the Bandcamp page would be a good thing, make it more interesting and increase the options for stuff to listen to and buy, but maybe it is too cluttered now? Things were going well when there were only 4 or 6 albums on the page - shortly right after I upped it to 8 albums on the page it turned into zero sales, day after day after day, up to and including zero sales today, now a full week of nothing.
Is the quantity the answer? Just too much stuff to look at or listen to at once? Or just too visually unappealing to have so many small album covers rather than a few bigger album covers taking up the same space?
Maybe I should experiment and remove a couple things, bring it back down to 6 albums, and see what happens. Or scientifically do one week with 4 items, one week with 6 items, one week with 8 items, and rotate between these three versions for a couple months to see if there's any solid statistical correlation that emerges.
Has anybody else had any experience with this sort of stuff?
It's really interesting that Bandcamp lets you access all the statistics so easily.
Fri, 05/20/2011 - 3:54pm
#2
It's a proven fact..
Dropping the name Schwervon! is a sure fire way to decrease anyone's popularity ; )
Fri, 05/20/2011 - 3:59pm
#3
Hey Everybody
I know Schwervon!.
I know Schwervon!.
I know Schwervon!.
Just last week I was over at Nan and Matt's place--you know--Schwervon!.
Fri, 05/20/2011 - 6:00pm
#4
Who the fuck is Barry Bliss?
Who the fuck is Barry Bliss?
Fri, 05/20/2011 - 6:19pm
#5
he's above you
and you are beneath him.
Fri, 05/20/2011 - 7:39pm
#6
and fittingly, look where you
and fittingly, look where you are!
Mon, 05/23/2011 - 2:51am
#7
Stuff
Choice is funny.
There's the idea of decision anxiety, for starters.
I once put out a 4x4 display of bottles at the co-op, and they sat untouched for over a week. One of them broke or something, I forget.. and so then the perfect square was gone, and 3 sold in as many days.
People are funny.
Bandcamp has good song stats, but I've never seen their visit stats reporting. Looking at visitors average durations, and what pages they arrive on / leave from can give some insight into what's going on during those visits. If they allow you to insert HTML into your album pages, I can help set up better stats for you if you want.
2 months is really not a lot of time to collect stats.
I think highlighting an item on the landing page is nice. Not sure what it looked like before, but I'd shy away from an undifferentiated grid, personally.
Tue, 05/24/2011 - 9:45am
#8
Bandcamp does actually have
Bandcamp does actually have really good stats, easy to access and clearly broken down.
You can see the "buzz" stats, on a daily or weekly or monthly or "all-time" basis, which is a list of all the ways people have linked to your Bandcamp page (like whether they went there from a link on your website home page or from a link on your website discography page, or from an interview you did on the internet, etc).
You can see sales, of course.
And you can see plays/listens, which are broken down even by how much of a track someone listened to, which is very interesting. Listening to at least 90% of a track counts as a full listen. Listening to something like 20% to 89% of a track counts as a partial listen, and listening to less than 20% of a track counts as a skip. I'm amazed to see how this applies to different material - for example, if a track has a whole lot of skip listens, that would seem to indicate that something about the track is appealing to TRY to listen to, perhaps it has a cool song title, or perhaps it is the first song on the album, or whatever, but the fact that it only was listened to less than 20% of the way thru before the person got bored or sick of it will tell you that the song itself is not as engaging as the title, perhaps.
Stuff like that.
It's like those tests they do for corporate radio stations, playing 15 seconds of a song to a market research test-group to see if they'd stay on that station or keep turning the radio dial... a rare chance for indie acts to see how well they do in these circumstances.
I would be interested to hear how an experiment like that went.
While you're guesses as to why this has happened may be spot on, the following is what came to my mind:
""Correlation does not imply causation" (related to "ignoring a common cause" and questionable cause) is a phrase used in science and statistics to emphasize that correlation between two variables does not automatically imply that one causes the other....."
1 minute later,
Jeff, I just looked at your bandcamp page and that's not too crowded and the covers are not that small at all.
May just be a slow week, bro.
http://barrybliss.info/