[robertwill]

I know it sounds "impossible" but I believe there are probably ways to sell 1 million units of your song within a short period of time, like a month. I have my songs on bandcamp and it's all set up for people to buy (and you can do this easily, too). So all you need is for people to actually buy! How would go about getting 1 million units sold? Any ideas?

[Boydie]

@robertwill

I have posted this quite a few times over the years on here about this...

Yes - it is possible, and for the most part it is all down to very basic business “marketing” - there is nothing different about selling music or selling a food product IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR COMMERCIAL SUCCESS

Some people write “from the heart” and get a bit “cork sniffer” about their art. This approach can lead to success, as they stumble upon something other people dig and want to buy

The “commercial” approach is more about the traditional business marketing approach - identify a target market and develop a product to meet this need

This is how recording labels do it - the “product” is a combination of the artists (look, image, following) and “the song”

These are then tailored to “the market” - which often means writing songs to previously successful formulas etc. - which some songwriters see as “selling out” or “inferior” - but it is INCREDIBLY difficult to write “a hit”

As with business, disruptors come along out of left-field that break all the rules and are successful - which then spawns a string of copy cats - but this is quite rare

So - to sell a million in a month, IMHO you need to either...

Find the market for the songs you have already written and promote heavily to this market

Write songs specifically for a market...and promote heavily to this market


The real skill is working out how to stand out in a market when everyone is trying to do the same thing - and the answer is: “be different, but not too different” 

[robertwill]

My thinking is very similar to yours however I believe there there are more possibilities to explore. First, yes music is a product like anything else. So you market just like you would say if you made bars of soap, say regular soap. The difference though from soap is that at a certain price you will sell 1 million bars of the soap within a month. Like if you offered 10 bars for $1. Word would quickly get out and you would sell millions of bars. Music is a product but not like soap, or cars, or shoes or mobile phones. All those products will sell at a certain price. Music will not. Even at a penny for your song.

If your song was a 60 second commercial on the major tv networks every 15 minutes for a year you would sell a millions of songs but your expenses to buy those commercials would far exceed sales.

It could be that a million songs should not be the goal. It should be like 10,000 songs per week - each time you put out a song 10,000 people buy it for $1. That's certainly enough to make a career off one's music and there are certainly a group of 10,000 people who will buy anything, regardless of what your music songs like. There are about 8 billion people in the world. So you need just 1 person each million of population to buy your song a week.

On the other hand there must be other ways to generate sales. Right now I do not know those ways but that does not mean they do not exist. In fact it could be really easy to sell 1 million units of a song. 

One thing that is interesting is that a percentage of the top selling music artists, or artists with high sales numbers, started on social media. They could not have predicted their future so that could happen to anyone. That's like winning the lottery but you need to have at least one song and be online.

[missking1]

Selling 1 million units of your song monthly is a lofty goal but possible. You need to build a strong marketing strategy. Social media advertising is huge for that, and I've found Facebook to be particularly effective. I use this Facebook adspy tool, which helps with spying on successful ads, aiding in developing a winning strategy. You can see what your competitors are doing right and mimic it.
Besides, consider collaborating with influencers, getting your music on playlists, and hosting virtual performances or release parties. Always engage with your fans.

[Elvis Nash]

Dosen't sound right making 10k off bandcamp . It seems everybody is on there
anybody with a pulse and bad songs are on there . It would take promotion money to get above all the noise
Its hard to find a good guru on marketing's