I’m buying your tune – Zombies for $1. Worth every penny!

Take it Easy Jon! Can’t wait to see you play a UK show

Bob Welch
(ex-Fleetwood Mac/Capitol records artist)

P.S. Bob Lefsetz gave me your url in one of his emails.

May Cthulhu and the FSM forgive me, I’ve even paid to have the excellent karaoke songs, and — mea culpa — have committed them. In public. To my surprise, people come up to me afterwards (my voice is well suited to a career as a mime) and want to know who wrote/performed the original, because… it was DIFFERENT, and kinda cool, you know?

In closing: JoCo, you made my month^H^H^H^H^Hyear when you announced the B.C.E. set. First thing after my initial squeeee (and evicting colleagues from orkplace office!) was to order a DVD+CD set — no, make that two (because She really does love the TAW). Second thing: brace myself for a nail-biting week before I get to hear any of it …
… and you blindsided me by GIVING AWAY THE ZIP ARCHIVE TO TIDE ME OVER!

You. Are. Full. Of. Awesome. And. Win. Thank you * 1.0+06 !

There, is that a coherent economic model?

I bought the $70 set even though I don’t care for ALL of the songs (I know, heresy), because I love the overwhelming majority of them, and I figure JoCo deserves the money. As it happens at the moment, I can afford it, and it was a feel-good purchase. At the moment, my playlists are inhabited entirely by Coulton songs.

No DRM made all the difference however. I would not have bought a single one if they had DRM.

If only life were that simple.

Going back now to re-buy all the tracks on FLAC.

Keep up the evil plot; it’s working.

When I donated money you offered to reimburse me a dollar for every song that sucked. When I brought you cookies at the Hodgman book reading you wouldn’t take my money for the CD I wanted. When I worked merch you wouldn’t take my money for the tshirts I wanted. When you were in Vegas at the Coverville 500 show, not only did you rip up the check I tried to give you, but you brought me beer from the Green Room.

Since you won’t ever take my money I’ve had to do things like buy tickets to concerts I’m on the comp list for, and buy songs when you release new ones.

But even if I’d downloaded Blue Sunny Day for free, I would have had to come back and pay for it anyway because it is a totally AWESOME song!

~Sharon

Every little bit helps, I think, and that’s the lesson you keep teaching me every day.

PPS I really hope someone was taping because the numbers with Paul & Storm and awesome ukelele chick whose name I am too lazy to look up were brilliant! Creepy Doll killed me – my face still hurts from smiling so hard.

PPPS I absolutely agree with Melanie – I’d much rather give money because I want to – especially directly to the artist if at all possible – than be forced to fork over money to get the music when most of that money goes to record labels keeping musicians in slavery.

Then, when I looked at my JoCo collection, I realized that I no longer had Shop Vac, Creepy Doll, Famous Blue Raincoat, or A Talk with George – all favorites of mine from Thing A Week (I seem to have misplaced several of the songs from my collection from the podcast somehow).

So I went to iTunes and bought all of those. I’ve always liked them, but the release of the new song definitely was the thing that made me look at the playlist on my iPod and realize I there was other stuff I wanted.

And – I’m well aware that I just could have downloaded them again from TAW, but I figure if I like them enough to be looking for them, I like them enough to pay for them.

I think with things like music the free is a great thing – if the listener digs it, they are just going to want more. And it sounds like you’ve got the data to back that.

Was all excited to get the first sales report from iTunes, all it does is full your head with fail.

I’m not even going to ask to see reports anymore (unless it’s a payday!)

Jarod

(Tim Larson and the Owner/Operators)

[I listened to it in the browser (Firefox Win with quicktime)]

Keep up the good work and keep writing about it cos you will inspire other music makers to do their thing and then I’ll find some music I *will* buy.

The model is good and it seems it will triumph.

But the point is, it’s really great to be able to say “he wants me to give this to you, and if you want any more, just download them or ask me.” (As opposed to sneaking around).

Since about fall of 2006, I’ve bought: tickets to 6 shows (sometimes more than 1); 2 T-shirts; all the CDs; many (20?) karaoke tracks; at least a few of the Aftermath tracks; several bananas, monkeys and robots; and donated to CC to get the source tracks drive. And I’ll be buying that DVD too, just as soon as it’s available (nudge, nudge).

I’m a musician myself, so I do what I can to support my brothers and sisters in the art.

The ‘business model’ where you slowly and steadily get everyone on the planet to be a fan of yours, and then do concerts for money seems to be a pretty good one – getting known about is the key to the whole thing.

I’m glad that I could help you out, and thank you for entertaining me.

Being at the 2nd London concert where you said a big thank you to everyone bought a bit of a tear to my eye.

ttfn

I think I will donate soonish.
Please, persuade them to add at least one more song of yours to Rock Band. I want to play a Coulton challenge.

To answer a couple of questions that have come up:

1) Subscription services – if you are paying someone money to download my music, chances are some of it’s getting to me eventually. Napster, eMusic, Rhapsody, these are all legit services that pay me through CDBaby.

2) I make some money from physical merch, CDs and shirts, but the largest portion of my income comes from digital sales. Last year it was about 45% of my income. Maybe 20% was tickets at shows, another 20% physical merchandise, and the rest of it various other stuff (private events, commission work, donations, etc.)

3) I don’t get any royalties from the Orange Box, that was a one time buyout situation.

4) On the subject of which outlets are best for me financially – it’s very hard to compare subscription services to purchases, but if I had to guess I’d say buying from my digital store is the highest ratio of money you spend to money in my pocket. That said, don’t worry about it, the point is that it all adds up to a money pooping cow. Just be relaxed about it and consume the way you want.

And thank you to everyone who spreads the word – that’s the big thing I forgot to mention in my post, is that even if someone gets all the music for free, as long as they pass the virus on to someone else, I win (eventually).

As one of your fans, I’ve only ever used your store one time– and that was for some karaoke tracks. I own physical copies of each CD you have available on CDBaby.

So some curious questions from me:
How many physical CDs do you sell? (through any means)
What are your iTunes stats? (I assume you’re on there through CDBaby and so it’s easy to check)
And how much do you get everytime someone buys a copy of The Orange Box?

For reference, I got into your music having heard it at the end of podcasts (and realising that all these awesome songs I liked were by the same person). Then I listened exclusively through the flash previews for quite some time until I picked up Smoking Monkey and Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow at a UK Filk Convention. Then I went to a UK gig and picked up all the other CDs and a tour t-shirt.

Every time a new song comes out I spread the word and enthuse about it to my friends, so hopefully I’m doing my bit even though I’m not paying for songs as soon as they’re on the blog…

After that I bought virtually all of their albums (including import singles with weird B-sides), I saw them four times, I bought tons of T-shirts and other merchandise (including – no lie – an air freshener), was a paid member of the fan club for years, etc.

Then they became the mouthpiece of the RIAA and one day I became one of the 30,000+ fans booted off Napster for downloading some songs (that I already owned) so I could listen to them on a different pc. In an instant, they lost all of my future business (and support) to preserve the pithy and diminishing chunk of money they were making on CD sales.

I AM huge JoCo fan. How did I get turned on to JoCo? I heard the interview with Terri Gross on Fresh Air and downloaded the free MP3s of the live performances. Since then I’ve bought the box set, T-shirts, and the wife and I have seen two live shows in less than a year (and we’ll see him any time he shows his face in Michigan).

This is the future of music. It’s a better, brighter future because it’s not directed by corporate executives who strangle creativity because they’re trying to mass-produce profitable schlock that the highest number of people will tolerate listening to four times per hour on the radio.

JoCo: You just keep on keepin’ on – you are the “Long Tail” personified. You’re a shining city on a hill (or at the very least, a wolf-covered lair on a mountain) that serves as a beacon to anyone who yearns to make a living doing what they love.

(i) I pissed away most of that day and the next on your site (lost value to US economy: I don’t know, a few hundred bucks maybe, theoretically, though I probably would have been pissing the day away on something else anyway),

(ii) emailed you that I thought you were awesome, etc., and told you I was going to buy the box set,

(iii) did not buy the box set,

(iv) went to your show in Houston ($28, plus cost of one spilled Diet Coke, which House of Blues graciously re-served for free, emailed you that I was going to buy all your stuff,

(v) listened to a lot more of your stuff over the next couple of weeks (still no downloading), and

(vi) bought the box-set day before yesterday.

Still haven’t heard the vampire song though.

As for my purchasing/downloading history. I found your songs first through a friend sending me an mp3, then youtube and the WoW machinima. By that point I had two or three of your mp3s, since I don’t crawl for mp3s usually. At some point I finally stumbled onto your website but didn’t buy or download anything until because I wasn’t big into listening to music.

Later I ended up with my programming job and decided listening to my co-workers was going to drive me insane, so I bought pretty much half of thing a week (anything with the three or four songs that I had) to listen to. Then came back 6 months later and bought the second half, and any straggler songs that caught my fancy while listening to the, what did you call it? Blue Tagger? things.

So a friend of mine who keeps track of concerts told me you were performing in Houston, so I opted into that. Drama with the tickets meant that I purchased multiple tickets and half my friends ended up not going. (Which of course led to me having to enact the famous string breaking incident for my friends. We all laughed in sympathy for you, of course).

On a side note, come back to Texas soon so my friends who missed out can see you perform (with or without g-string jokes, your choice). I understand if you like Austin but thats a 4 hours drive for me, and Houston is only an hour and a half. College Station might not be worth it for you but you might look into it.

And your twitter comment about breaking your site was enough to have me look at this blog, which is enough to make me look at your new song. It made me tap my foot but I’m debating purchasing it or not, as I’ve lately moved on to podcasts as a way to drone out my co-workers incessant moaning. Also I have a minor $1 purchases and would prefer to buy multiple songs in a package because I find I like your songs more on repeated listening than on initial presentation. So baring the FLAC thing, which interests me but I seem to have failed in figuring out how to purchase it, I’ll likely wait to buy Blue Sunny Day until you have a few more songs that I like or one song that I really really want.

(Incidentally I do this with Rock Band too. Buy songs I want, and throw in a few ‘maybe’ songs from a long list I sort every month or so, every time I buy a ‘song I must have’ but feel bad for just buying one thing. Yeah I think I’m weird when it comes to music…)

It’s interesting that the people who donate seem disproportionately represented among the commenters. I’m guessing that those who do that are also disproportionately responsible for getting the word out about you.

1) Friend sent me code monkey.
2) Immediately got hooked into Thing a Week. Downloaded all past episodes and all future episodes as they came out.
3) Bought the box set
4) Have downloaded everything since I bought the box set for free.
5) Been to 1 concert (but you haven’t had any more in my area!)

Should I do my taking-music-from-JoCo-and-giving-money-to-JoCo breakdown too? Yeah, might as well.

1) downloaded the Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms for free from some Popular Science page.
2) downloaded all of the smiley-face-free songs and subscribed to the Thing A Week podcast to get all those free.
3) bought all the rest of the stuff, except for one or two tracks which I somehow didn’t notice.
4) went to a show in London, bought one ticket, one T-shirt, and one Thing-A-Week box set (which I still haven’t opened) and gave JoCo some chocolate, CERN souvenirs and punch cards.
5) went to four more shows in the UK, bought five tickets (because I’d left one in my hotel) and one T-shirt, gave JoCo another random gift. He’ll probably have to build another wing on his mansion for all these random gifts. Oh wait, he said he wasn’t rich.
6) donated to CC and got flash drive, but I guess that’s feeding a whole different cow.
7) bought a couple of karaoke tracks to use as background music for a thing I was doing.
went back to freeloading, downloaded BSD and other aftermath tracks without paying, as well as many bootlegs of shows.

Matthew: I did that… didn’t get any poop, not that I had any poop-catchers at the ready anyway (you really have to quit your job so you have time to actually milk the cow, or collect its poop if that’s more your thing) but I got quite attached to the cow and I think I’ll keep it as a pet. I’d recommend it. A word (actually a couple of sentences) of advice though: Do not try to write a novel a week for a year. The cow will get sick and die from overeating. Also, don’t feed the cow parts of a novel before the novel is finished. Once it’s in the cow, there’s only one way to get it out, and it’s… money? I think I’ve botched this metaphor. Don’t eat beef.

I lack the courage to quit my day job until I’ve got a decent pile of poop coming out regularly, though.

Here’s what I did:
1. Got 15 songs off a friend. Listened to them like crazy. Decided this JoCo guy, he is for me (both for the music and the philosophy).
2. Bought the $70 Box Set, before it had The Aftermath in it.
3. Listened to them like crazy. Still going.

Now my thinking is, I’m happy to pay for them but I don’t want to listen to them beforehand. Otherwise, I feel like I’m not actually “buying” anything. You don’t get that nice feel-good after making a purchase. So I think you are set up quite ideally with a bunch of “officially free” songs and the rest which are technically not free.

So I haven’t listened to The Aftermath, and I’m planning to buy The Aftermath when it’s “finished”, and then I’ll have the feel-good of a whole new JoCo album. When is it going to be “done”? I might just give in and buy all the tracks separately…

And yes, please visit Australia

Anyways, come to Australia so the far off fanboys (and girls I’m sure) can shower you with cash.

Thanks for making your work available for free. It really has kept me sane.

I don’t feel particularly good about not giving something back for something I get joy out of pretty much every day. Next time I actually have disposable income I plan to buy some albums, or upgrade to FLAC and confuse your statistics.

Thanks again.

I have paid you before but also downloaded a few of your tracks from eMusic – I hope you get a fair amount of money from them too.

I’m certain I would not have gone to any shows if it hadn’t been for the free downloads that got me hooked. (It’s as though a creepy bearded guy in a trench coat came up to me on a dark street and whispered “Hey, little boy, try this download. It’s free, and all the cool kids are doing it…” Now I’m just another junkie with a monkey on my back.)

I’m in for the DVD, too.