Indie Label Exit Stencil Goes Free For February
Wonderfully named indie label Exit Stencil is giving it all away during Free February. Almost all of their 20 release catalog will be available for free digital download. No gimmicks, no asking for donations, no limit to the number of releases available to each person — just a free chance to check out a bunch of bands they've worked with over the past couple of years.
Included are HotChaCha (above), Mystery Of Two, Blake Miller and others. Visit www.exitstencil.org and download away.
I'll ask the label heads of Exit Stencil to gauge the success of it's Free February experiment when it's done. Particularly of interest is how did it effected both short and long term sales.
What do you think? Will Exit Stencil benefit from the publicity bump that giving everything away may bring. It certainly worked for Mojo Nixon and his million track blitz on Amazon. Or are fans tiring of free and would Exit Stencil's artists have benefited from a more strategic giveaway strategy?
I write about music and edit the music section of a small literary mag (AtLengthMag.com), and I don’t think I’ve heard of this label or anyone on their roster before today. But as a result of this promotion and this blog post, I will undoubtedly change that before the week is over. That seems to be a definite success for a small label looking to find an audience for their artists.
The key words you used are ‘publicity bump’. Regardless of how well it works for Exit Stencil, the value of this kind of promotion is bound to decline as more people try it. That said, I’ll definitely be checking out their catalog!