So, it's been quite a while since the build up to the first single release. The primary mission was a success in that I now have the experience of taking a song right from sketches on paper through to available to buy online and chart eligible.

Sales pretty much dropped off when I stopped pushing people into buying the song. One major learning experience was that IndieStore wasn't as impressive as I'd have hoped. I'll do a follow-up post right after this one to talk about other things I've been looking at.

For anyone who's interested, here's some statistics from the debut single campaign:

Total sales through IndieStore are an astonishing 13 at the moment. Two people chose to pay by SMS. This does technically put Kalypso 53 into the lead with a total sales count of 13. However, that number might be higher for reasons that I will explain in the next post.

I ran a campaign on Last.fm to get more people I don't know to hear the song. It costs £13 to get 100 people hearing it and you can target fans of any artists you choose.

I chose Pet Shops Boys for obvious reasons as well as Duran Duran and Erasure. The results seem to be that 67 people out of the 100 actually let the track play to completion, with 32 skipping it before the end. I'm not sure what happened to that 1 person that seemed to achieve neither. I have no comparative figures, but I'm certainly not unhappy that 2/3 people were unwilling (or, admittedly, unable) to skip the track.

I ran an ad campaign on Facebook to promote the Kalypso 53 Facebook page. The ad got 26,820 impressions and had 6 clicks. This ended up costing me $0.56 so I'm ambivalent as to whether that was a good use of my money.

Overall, there's worse starts and I have a better idea of what I'm doing now. Also, I would like to reiterate Kalypso 53 are winning.