Stream The Album, Make It Cheaper – Social Distortion Puts Fans In Control of Record Price

How do you get fans to listen to the entire album anymore?

They want the single. Hell, they probably have the single already. And the rest of the tracks, depending on how big of a fan they are, don't matter so much. Marketers are asking fans to take upwards of half-an-hour to 80 minutes to listen to an album and hope that they don't play Call of Duty the whole time, ignoring the album and its presence altogether.

Social Distortion has attempted to buck this trend with their latest album release.

Often, when full-album streams are put online, the first few tracks get all the attention and interest falls off a cliff from there. To circumvent this common problem, their label, Epitaph, helped the group devised a different strategy.

With every 100k streams, the price of the album drops by a dollar on Amazon down to $7.99. Epitaph had two goals with this strategy. (1) To encourage fans to listen to the entire record, not just the first couple of tracks, and (2) to encourage the spreading of the record by giving fans ownership and control. And it worked.

Social Distortion let fans control the price of their record.

The new album, "Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes", is well on its way to hit their target of 500,000 streams. Also, Jason Fisher, the Director of New Media at Epitaph, told Hypebot in an e-mail that the shares have been incredible on it.

How did they get fans to share this through social media?

If a fan tells their fans about the promo on Facebook or Twitter, they're entered to win an autographed guitar. Due to this, the Amazon preorder has seen a 500% increase in sales since the start of the promotion (last Tuesday) with its peak point so far at #3 overall on the retailer's site. Thus far, each day of the promotion has seen at least a 25% increase in Amazon sales over the previous day.

"The more they spread or listen to the record, the more the price drops, inviting them to be more than a passive listener," Fisher explained. "It transforms them into a champion for the band where they can see their results unfold firsthand."

Voxbloc.com helped them integrate the thermometer with the SoundCloud player.

Social Distortion – Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes by Epitaph Records