Mojo Nixon Amazon Giveaway Tops 1 Million Tracks
In what may be a record for free digital downloads, Mojo Nixon has given away more than 1 million tracks since Oct 6th via Amazon MP3. To put the 1,000,000 number in perspective, during a typical week 35,000 Mojo Nixon tracks are traded via P2P and a top tier artist is lucky if they sell 150-200,000 paid downloads of a hit single in a week, Eric Garland of net tracker Big Champagne told the Wall Street Journal.
Mojo had no idea this promotion would be so succesful. "The doomed the damned and the demented need a little help in these tough times," Nixon told Hypebot before the launch. But fans better hurry; the free promotion ends October 28th. "I'm crazy, not stupid," he declared.
Why was this free promotion so successful?
- The power of Amazon. If Mojo had just done this on his own site, the numbers would be much, much lower.
- Mojo Nixon has always attracted press and this stunt was no exception.
- He hosts 3 shows on Sirius XM and has not been shy about using that platform to promote the free downloads.
- 1 million represents total tracks of all of his releases including a new album
But a million is still a very impressive number; and publicity showered on semi-retired cult musician has been priceless.
who the hell is mojo nixon
I’m not sure there is anything significant here: Amazon customers happily accepted free stuff. If you shop there, you know how rare free anything (other than shipping) really is, and are already hip to the free mp3s, which only Amazon promotes. Mojo and his people simply promoted free like a record, and more people bit. So what?
After the death of Napster, this might have been news, but today it’s pretty mundane stuff. Sure, a million people sounds impressive, but I bet they got a million people to try New Coke once with advertising and promotion. How did that work out? If there’s a story here it’s this:
How many of those million freebies will Mojo be able to convert into even $1 single sales over the next 3 months (a fair, conventional milestone in promotions)? If he gets 100,000 cash sales in that time frame on Amazon (the Device Under Test), I’d say it was a good investment and news. Less than that, it’s a failure (except as a PR stunt – it’s already succeeded there). Pretty simple.
This is truly a non-story. Lacking the perspective of time, it’s just repeating a press release. It feels like it’s desperately feeding the free meme, without much evidence, analysis or critical perspective. Do the homework, and report back when it’s a story, please!