Siren on We7.com

Thanks Julian for posting the stats and asking people for feedback. The internet is brilliant for counting and reporting, and yet the music industry is still very bad at simple things like sharing and analysing data which should be freely available. All of us at we7 believe in being transparent and telling people quickly whats happened so they can make some conclusions about what it means. And what it means will vary according to the case, the context and expectation.

Let me give some further input to help your analysis. we7 is a mainstream music site with 1.6 million unique users every month coming to we7.com and 1.4 million playing we7 widgets on 3rd party sites, 80% of whom are 30 or under. we7 is a site people use mainly during the day wherever they are online, so at work, college, university, school etc usually to dip in to listen to something specific and then dip out. Once at we7, they listen mainly to chart stuff (50% of all plays) and hundreds of thousands of other songs which get played a few times each. We sell a few thousand mp3s every week, usually chart stuff.

We dont have a lot of music advertising on our site as we dont give away free inventory to labels like others. So when we do run a music ad campaign, our users notice, even if its from a name they dont know featuring a soundbite of a song they havent heard elsewhere. The audio ad on we7 is much more effective than a display in grabbing attention, hence the high 0.49% rate. With mainstream artists with audio ads we have got as high as 1% click through - for display only the European average is 0.18% ie only 18 people in a thousand click.

When someone clicked through on your ad, they went to the we7 Georgia Wonder song page where the normal action would be to stream. This is what most did, with 70% playing more than 30 secs of a track they didnt know - this is excellent as it means the music is strong, and on we7 you get paid for every stream. If the link had gone instead to your own website offering say some goodies such as a free download in exchange for an email address you might expect even higher pick-up.

In my view the achievement here is that some of a mainstream audience have responded to and played a few thousand times a song they didnt know before from an artist they dont know. With 6 million songs to choose from on we7, its all about being on the radar of users at the time, whether that happens because of radio play, touring, charts, other promotion or in this case an ad campaign. Its the beginning of a fan relationship for you to build upon with other activities, which can eventually lead to sales, tickets, merch or whatever you wish to drive.

Cheers for sharing the stats!

Do you know what the CPC would have been if you had to pay?

Personally, I'm not too surprised by the sales figures (sale figure?!) because music purchases don't usually happen that soon after a fan first discovers a new artist.

Is there any other way you could connect with the fan on We7 before trying to make a sale? Like getting an email address or a Facebook Like?

If you could turn the 4413 listeners into 100 email addresses, then I'd say you'd have a better chance of making 10 album/EP sales a few weeks/months later. If that was possible it might be worth the investment!

Very interesting and I really don't know what it all means. Maybe people only ever download mainstream chart stuff. I usually use Amazon for digital downloads.