More on '100 CDs for 100 Bloggers'

It seems that my blogging about the idea of a music promotion aimed at bloggers, or '100 CDs for 100 Bloggers' is finally starting to gain some traction, as I've gotten a few people discussing it here, on DF, and via email. Almost everyone agrees it's a great idea, but there are a couple of 'concerns' that have been raised that I wanted to address here:

1 - Why give away music to people that would buy the CD anyway? Why lose sales?

To be completely blunt, this is terribly short-sighted thinking. You don't focus on losing 100 CD sales upfront, you focus on how many sales you will GAIN on the backend. When Stormhoek gave away 100 bottles of wine last year, it could be said that they lost those sales. But on the backend, Hugh reported that Stormhoek's sales DOUBLED, in 'tens of thousands of cases'.

Let's say Stormhoek's 100 free bottles of wine promotion 'only' gave Stormhoek 10,000 extra cases sold. That means that giving away 100 bottles upfront, resulted in a minimum of 60,000-120,000 extra bottles sold. In reality, it was likely several hundred thousand bottles sold from this promotion.

The difference with the '100 CDs for 100 Bloggers' example is, you are dealing with bloggers that are ALREADY fans of the product. Whereas the Stormhoek promotion was basically 'try it and see what you think', the CD promotion targets fans of the artist. Fans that are willing and WANTING to promote the artist and their music.


2 - How do you know which blogs to target? How do you know how many visitors each blog has?

It doesn't matter. This is why you go after a GROUP of bloggers, not individual ones. Don't think of it as targetting individual bloggers, think of it as targetting a COMMUNITY of bloggers. Again, the FIRST label to do this will be in the catbird's seat, because the promotion itself will be so revolutionary (money-grubbing labels are now GIVING AWAY music?!?), that the promotion will generate as much or more positive coverage in the blogosphere as the artist and artist's CD will. And that positive coverage will spillover to affect the label as a whole, which will transfer to all the label's artists as well.

Again that's the funny thing about bloggers, you ignore us (Dell-Hell) and we will flame you to ashes. Embrace us, and we'll sing your praises from the highest mountaintop. Let's be honest, most bloggers blog around with a 'no one takes us seriously' chip on their shoulders. If a company were to execute a promotion that DOES take them seriously, they will go out of their way to reward that effort.


It's only a matter of time before a label steps up to the plate and runs with this promotion. And the first one to do so is going to seriously make waves. As you can imagine, I have my own thoughts on which label(s) this would work best for, but we'll see what happens.