Billy Darnells Blog

Hi Guys and Gals,

I thought I would get back here and give you some insight as to how things are going given the fact we have some early initial numbers to analyze.

Up to this point we have sent out over 250 emails to radio stations and DJ’s worldwide. Posted an international press release that will be seen by 9,000 interested parties, started a facebook page announcing the free downloads, along with updating our myspace page.

The first week we had over 200 downloads, and over the past week about another  100. We have no way of knowing but we believe that most of those downloads, probably about 90% if not greater,  went to Radio Stations and DJ’s.

The visitor numbers at the web site are up significantly, with the most increase in the new or unique visitors, almost 100 more than any previous month. The number of visits are also up a bit from the previous numbers from the months before.  About 85% of the new visitors bookmarked the site, and we have been visited by over 25 countries worldwide. Usually that count is 20 to 22. The largest increase of visits by country was the U.S., Great Brittan, Russia, and China. Amazingly the most visits monthly has always been the United States by a large number over other Nations or countries. I think that’s due to overall population numbers more than anything. The reason it strikes me as strange is most of our air play comes from European countries.

So what does all this mean? Well, it’s a little early to read too much into it, but initially there are a few conclusions we can draw from it. We were looking for increased exposure in all categories, DJ’s , Fans, and financially. It looks like we have a good start at accomplishing that goal, and that is about the most we can see at this point, but that’s a good thing.

The process will be a water fall kind of effect. The downloads will give us additional exposure if, and when, the DJ’s,and Radio programmers, start to work the songs they have downloaded into their play lists. We have been monitoring the play lists available, and at this point there is no significant increase in the number of plays we are getting, however, it does take some time for DJ’s and Station managers to get those new songs worked into their programming. We should know more within the next few weeks.

As the number of plays increase so will the exposure to listeners worldwide, which hopefully will generate a greater number of Fans, and create a little interest in other artists recording those songs.

I might add, in relevance to that, so far there have been no donations logged at Paypal, and no licensing activity at all, but I imagine it will take a while to see an increase, or any activity, in those areas.

We will continue to work at driving those numbers by running classified ads in free advertising venues and other forums through out the net, along with starting some personal appearances on Pal talk.

The free downloads can be obtained at:

http://www.4shared.com/account/dir/15150148/762d447c/sharing.html?rnd=34

Feel free to visit the site, and share that link with anyone you feel might have an interest.

I think up to this point we are headed in the right direction, but one of the things I am greatly anticipating is what the effect will be when we post a new single ( Which we are currently working on ) at the website. I think that will be very telling when it comes to how much greater interest we have really created.

That’s about it for now. If you have any comments on this subject,  or ideas on how we can improve the exposure to our music, please feel free to click on the comments link below. we always enjoy hearing your thoughts or views.

Until next time I hope the good Lord blesses you with good health, and much happiness.

Hello Everyone,

Well the changes we talked about in the last Blog are done. I know we gave you all the impression they were forth coming in the near future and at the time we believed that was an accurate reflection, however, changing the merchandising concept opened up the flood gates for many other opportunities that took a lot more time to analyze and consider. This was a major move, and a major change in direction, and we needed to weigh all the pro’s and con’s of the concept. After much consideration we came to the conclusion the good out weighed the bad, and that’s when the real work in planning began. If you haven’t been through the web site recently you should take a look at all the pages before you proceed to read this blog, it will help you to better understand the rambling…lol.

Just making the changes in themselves wasn’t enough, we had to develop a course of action that would make the world wide music community aware of what we were doing, and with their help, what we hoped to accomplish in the process.

A press release had to be written up, hundreds of Email addy’s had to be gathered, and the social websites had to be updated to reflect the changes. Along with the change in the marketing concept we decided it was equally important to evaluate the current web site and make long over due changes in that direction also.

We also had to find a site that tracked the free downloads so that we could track the numbers and information that will allow us to analyze trends, and help us to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign.

There has been much thought, and a lot of work done to get to this point, and there is a lot of work that still has to be done.

Some of you may be wondering why we felt the need to go in this direction and the answer to that is pretty simple. The most prominent reason is under the old traditional merchandising concept we just weren’t achieving the numbers to give us the exposure we needed.

That’s not to say over the past two years we haven’t made major inroads into the world wide music community because we most certainly have. Actually we have accomplished a great deal given the financial limitations we have worked under.The music has been widely accepted by Country Music Fans, Radio Stations and DJ’s world wide.

The unfortunate reality was, as good as it was, at the current trend in exposure, it would take us 20 years to build the fan base we needed to be successful in marketing our product. We initially thought we needed to influence thousands of music listeners, and the fact is we need to reach 10’s of thousands at a minimum, and 100’s of thousands to achieve moderate success. We feel this new merchandising and promotional effort will better help us to achieve those numbers. One thing for sure was under the old business model we would have never achieved those numbers.

In todays ever changing landscape of the music industry the independent artist need to be constantly evaluating the trends, and new concepts that are constantly evolving. We need to be innovative in our approach, and open to change constantly.

One of the most innovative concepts of this new plan was the resellers or retailers license. We have put an offer out there to partner up with small retail outlets  to replicate the CD’s and offer them for sale, using a shared expense , and shared profit business model. We paid the expense of producing the music, and the art work for the CD’s, their expense would be the cost of reproducing the packaging. In turn we would place a minimum suggested retail of $10 on the CD, and split the retail 50/50, and they would only be required to pay for the product they actually sell. The retailer would be required to submit pertinent data for follow up and in return he would receive a written license to distribute agreement from Billy Darnell Music. A more detailed description is available on the albums page at the site.

One of the major stumbling blocks for all independent Artists is how to achieve world wide distribution of their CD’s. We realize this concept probably wont work for a Wal-Mart, or a Sam Goodie’s type of operation, but their are hundreds, if not thousands, of small retailers out there that might embrace this concept, in an attempt to increase their product line, have a unique offer, and increase their profits. It’s those people we hope to entice with this offer.  It will be totally based upon the  “Honor” system, and that could be a problem, however, we feel that most business people that struggle, as we do, to make an honest dollar will be just that, honest. Will this concept catch on? Who knows, but it’s a lot better option than the one we have had to deal with in the past.

We are currently in PR mode getting the word out about the new concept, and we expect it to take several weeks to get that done. After that we have plans to get into the studio and try to produce a new single every month for the next 3 or 4 months. New single releases will be posted on the albums page as we release them.

Some other things in the making are video presentations for the social media outlets, getting out to a few song writer nights now and then, and trying to make more live appearances in the future.

There is a comment section on this Blog and we would love to hear your thoughts, and comments.

Until next time I wish you all good health and happy spirits.

Billy Darnell