Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Heard it on the tiny speakers

What is the measure of your success? For a holistic view of that and what might mean an appropriate answer, forget it. Too many spikes, flat lines and screaming dips along the way to take any kind of general view. Occasionally however a performance indicator comes along that isn’t just a bank balance print, a speedometer dial or a birthday card count. This week’s semi-permanent and possible to fail at any time measure is the newly discovered Jamendo music player and general gatherer of statistics and slushy numbers on the flickering screen. In our line of extremely low level promotion, activity and generally “not giving a stuff” Jamendo has yielded a strange and unexpected phenomenon - actual attention translated into stats and reviews. I suppose it’s not all that odd but for us considering the relatively short time we’ve been active on this site coupled with the numbers is unusual and a little unsettling - perhaps unbelievable. It may simply be that this wed site holds an audience that we’ve never before encountered and that their appetites and interest are set at levels we are unfamiliar with. Certainly it is a mainly European mainland focused thing (based in Luxembourg), so that removes the plethora of look-alikes and look nothing likes that inhabit myspace, cdbaby and reverb nation etc. Any progress there is hard work and not particularly rewarding, you sweat waiting on downloads, feedback, comments and streams that never come or are reported 6 months after the event. By then you’ve stopped caring. So Jamendo has rewarded us by at least restoring some faith and belief in the power of…power. The scores so far after 5 days activity and no promotion on our part are (according to the Luxembourg jury): 1471 listens, 47 downloads, 7 starred (no idea what that means!), play listed 4, reviews 4 (1 in Spanish), an overall rating of 7.3 out of 10 and one garbled message from an Estonian prostitute. Bizarre in a splendid, remote (phew!) and slightly unhinged European way.

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